1,000,000 Churchillian Words

The plumpest literary plum of World War II--the memoirs of Winston Churchill--fell this week to LIFE and the New York Times. It was prize fruit of massive size (projected as five volumes, 1,000,000 words), and many a newspaper, syndicate and magazine broker had hopefully shaken the tree. The price for the U.S. serial rights Churchill kept to himself, but gossips had been guessing for more than a year that his remembrances would sell for a record $1,000,000 or more.

The memoirs are still in the dictation stage: every day the memoirist rattles off Churchillian prose to his secretaries. Five ribbon-bound stacks of notes, diaries and outlines, one for each volume, lie on Winston Churchill's work table in his library at Chartwell. Early next year, it is hoped. Vol. I (probably covering the period up to Dunkirk) will appear in a weekly series in LIFE, and daily installments in the Times. Other installments will probably follow at six-month intervals, timed to dovetail with book publication by Houghton Mifflin Co.

Six months of negotiating paved the way for the big deal. When Britain's wartime Prime Minister came to the U.S. last year for a rest and his Fulton speech, he told inquirers that he might not write his memoirs, but would leave the raw material to his heirs. Last fall Viscount Camrose, his old friend and publisher of the London Daily Telegraph (see below), sailed for the U.S., ostensibly to enjoy the Queen Elizabeth's maiden voyage, but actually on a mission that not even his staffers knew about: he had come to tell prospective U.S. bidders that Churchill had changed his mind. Camrose himself has the Empire rights to the memoirs. He parried all U.S. offers until LIFE and the Times surprised him with a joint bid (both reasoned that the overlap in their circulations is negligible). Camrose went home with a two-page letter of agreement, one of many documents covering publication of the memoirs all over the world. Before all hands initialed it, the U.S. contract had grown to eleven pages and the complexity of a peace treaty.

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