Description:

Roosevelt Franklin



Franklin Roosevelt Signs and Inscribes His Biographical Book to His Son, Signed TWICE.



This item was featured by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Inc, in 1996 and was priced $20,000. Included with this book will be the original book description on Glenn Horowitz letterhead.  

 

Mr. Roosevelt, by Compton Mackenzie, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1944. First Printing. Blue cloth boards with purple titles and décor to the spine. Personally owned by Franklin Roosevelt. Presentation copy signed twice. Roosevelt SIGNED and INSCRIBED the book on the front fly leaf to his son, Elliot, as "Pa", and then additionally signed his inscription underneath with his name in full. "For Elliot with Love from his affectionate Pa / Franklin D. Roosevelt".  6" x 8.75". Boards lightly rubbed with a faint stain. Internally crisp and clean, with but one page with a red smudge. Housed in a blue cloth slip case with a blue quarter morocco spine with raised bands and gilt titles. A scarce title with an important FDR inscription; in over twenty years we have never encountered one as effusive as this. With superb provenance as described below.

 

This is no conventional biography, and Compton MacKenzie (1883-1972) was no ordinary biographer. He graduated from Oxford, but then abandoned his legal studies to pursue a writing career. He made his reputation with his first three novels. In 1915 he fought with the British Army at Gallipoli, was wounded, and later joined His Majesty's Secret Service, directing intelligence operations in the  Aegean. Those experiences inspired four more books, one of which, Greek Memories was withdrawn from circulation after MacKenzie was convicted under the Official Secrets Act for  disclosing details of British espionage.

 

MacKenzie uses discursive, colorful, authorial intrusions, it is a lively, aphoristic portrait: "If Roosevelt had been born ten years earlier, he would have been too old in 1933 to appreciate how much of the past had to be surrendered; if he had been born ten years later, he would have been too young to appreciate how much of the past had to be kept." Ostensibly a character study, MacKenzie declared in his preface that he "deliberately refrained from discussing Mr. Roosevelt's actions after he was elected President of the United States in 1932." But this was hardly an apolitical book. It is a compelling brief for the indispensability of FDR to the Allied cause-and for his re-election in 1944. "The more I have read about Mr. Roosevelt, the more firmly convinced have I grown of his immense power for good in this distracted world of to-day." MacKenzie never misses an opportunity to contrast Roosevelt's democratic decency with the foulness of his fascist foes. The polio attack, he writes, gave FDR "that kind of marmoreal serenity and almost Olympian detachment which makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a jack-in-the-box and a monkey-on-a-stick." Roosevelt's entire career seemed to reveal some fateful design to stem the fascist tide. 'When, on January 30, 1933, der Fuhrer became Chancellor, Providence had set a limit to his power in the person of a man who was celebrating his fifty-first birthday on that very date. Thus it befell that when der Fuhrer woke up on March 5, 1933, he was already beaten on the morning of his triumph in the new elections by a man fast asleep on the other side of the world who had just triumphed for democracy just one day ahead of him."

 

A highly desirable copy with a very personal and significant association and a superb chain of custody:

Ex:

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

-Elliot Roosevelt (son)

-Donald S. Carmichael

-Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Inc., 1996

-A Distinguished Gentleman



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