Kennedy, John F. (ed)
As we remember Joe.
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., “privately printed” 1945.
Full Description
8vo. xi + (1) + 75 + (1), including photo frontispiece and numerous photo text ills. Original purple cloth, with black cloth indented title on upper cover. Lord Beaverbrook’s copy, with his bookplate on front pastedown endpaper, with neat “Beaverbrook Library”book label below. Pencil note inside front cover reads “bought from Hardings bookshop, Great Russell Street, 27/5/75 (they having acquired it on the dispersal of the Beaverbrook library)”. A little wear at head of spine and one lower outer corner wrinkled, but a good copy, without other obvious faults.
First edition, first issue, with the wings on the title leaf printed in red (a 1965 reissue, put in hand by Robert F.Kennedy, has the wings printed in black). A necessary item for any collector of books relating to the Kennedy family or to US Presidents. It comprises twenty essays by various contributors on John F.Kennedy’s elder brother, Lieut.Joseph P.Kennedy, jr (1915-1944), killed while on service as a Navy pilot towards the end of the 1939-45 war. These include an affectionate personal tribute to his elder brother by John F.Kennedy himself (pp 1-5) and an amusing one by the future Senator Edward Kennedy, then a thirteen-year old schoolboy (p.59). The present copy seems to be unusual in not having a presentation inscription from John F.Kennedy, and we conjecture that Lord Beaverbrook, the celebrated Anglo-Canadian newspaper proprietor and Minister of Aircraft Production in the wartime UK government, was a sufficiently important recipient of the book that the book was sent to him with an accompanying personal letter from Kennedy which no longer accompanies it. The book was issued in an edition of 360 copies only, most of which have long since disappeared into institutional collections.