A Popular History of the Great War, Vol. IV

Opening

The Great War, boxed up and sold to the interwar living room. Fifteen years after the Armistice, the Amalgamated Press issued A Popular History of the Great War in six handsome red-cloth volumes — a thousand maps and photographs, the whole conflict retold “embodying the gist of post-war revelations and official documents.” This is Volume IV, and its subtitle is the grimmest of the set: A Year of Attrition — 1917.

The Object

The front board, red cloth blocked in black, carries the title above a drawing of a heavy field-gun; the spine is lettered in gilt — Hammerton at the head, A Year of Attrition 1917 and Volume 4 at the foot, around a small rising-sun-and-torch device. The title page states the shape of the whole enterprise: “Complete in six volumes with about 1000 maps & illustrations,” published in London at The Fleetway House and “printed in Great Britain by The Amalgamated Press, Ltd.” Inside, the Literary Contents run to thirty chapters and the List of Plates to more than sixty images — the machinery of the Edwardian-into-interwar illustrated part-work at full stretch.

The Editor

The name on every volume is Sir John Alexander Hammerton (1871–1949), described by the Dictionary of National Biography as the most successful creator of large-scale works of reference in the history of publishing. During the war itself he had co-edited the Amalgamated Press's fortnightly The Great War: The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict; afterwards he turned out popular encyclopaedias, Wonders of the Past, Countries of the World and this retrospective history, knighted in 1932 for services to literature. A Popular History of the Great War is Hammerton doing what he did better than anyone: turning a vast subject into an affordable, richly illustrated, subscriber's set for the ordinary household.

A Year of Attrition

Volume IV is the pivot of the war. Its chapters cover 1917 — the year the United States entered the war and Russia dissolved into revolution; the year of Vimy Ridge, Messines, and the long agony of Passchendaele; of the Italian catastrophe at Caporetto, the first mass tank battle at Cambrai, and Allenby's capture of Jerusalem. The plate list — Bolshevist soldiers in Petrograd, American troops marching through Paris, the Dramatic Surrender of Jerusalem, Queen Mary at Calais — reads like a newsreel of the year the war became a world war.

The World It Came From

This is popular print culture doing public memory. By 1933 the generation that had fought was raising the generation that would fight again, and cheap illustrated histories like this one — sold volume by volume, bound in bright cloth for the shelf — were how millions of British families kept and understood the war. It sits naturally beside the collection's other interwar publisher's-series volumes: the Odhams Fifty Amazing Stories of the Great War, and the News Chronicle's Gilbert & Sullivan part-work — the same Fleet Street machine turning history, adventure and music alike into affordable cloth-bound sets.

This Copy

Honest reading condition — Fair. The red cloth is rubbed and dust-marked, the spine sunned and frayed at head and tail with fraying to the joints, and the paper toned, but the volume is sound and complete with its title page, contents, and plate lists. There is no ownership inscription. It came in the February 2026 lot of twenty-seven books.

Why It Matters

A single volume of a common 1930s history set is inexpensive on its own. Its value here is as a clean specimen of how interwar Britain remembered the First World War — through the mass-market part-work — and as a third witness, beside the Odhams and News Chronicle volumes, to the Amalgamated Press / Fleet Street publishing machine and its greatest editor, Sir John Hammerton. That this volume is 1917 — the hinge year of revolution, American entry and Passchendaele — gives it the most consequential subject of the six.