Physical description

Hard Cover Book. History of The Great European War Set 2 Vol 6
Author: W Stanley Macbean Knight
Publisher: The Caxton Publishing Company Ltd Clune House, 161 Surrey St, London W.C.
Printer: The Standard Publishing Co. 100 Flinders St, Melbourne.
Date: Various Volume Subscription Releases 1914 to 1920
Further Information: Red pictorial cloth gilt-lettered boards, each volume illustrated with a coloured frontispiece, black-and-white photographic plates, and fold-out colour maps of various fronts depending on volume(e.g. the Serbian Retreat, the Italian front etc.). Note there are two sets of this publication in the Flagstaff book collection.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

No labels or Library stamps visible.

Summary

This set is a contemporary and popular narrative history of WWI, written and published while the war was still happening; the preface is dated 1914, but volumes were issued serially as the war progressed, meaning later volumes covering 1917–18 and the peace were released several years after the first. This is a common format for the period — compare rival serials like The Great War (Hammerton & Wilson) or Collier's The Story of the Great War — publishers issued 'instant history' in subscription parts to a public hungry for authoritative-sounding accounts.
The volumes in this set cover the following topics during the First World War:
Vol. I — Causes and Effects (1914): Its aims are to explain the political and diplomatic background to the war — the alliance system and the July Crisis — with the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.
Vol. II: Continues into the opening campaigns of 1914 (per Internet Archive, 'Vol 2 of 10', contemporary account).
Vol. III: Descriptions note it as continuing the story of the campaign of the Allies and their mid-war campaigns.
Vol. IV: Covers 1916 and the ongoing 1915–16 campaigns; this volume contains a fold-out colour map of the Serbian Retreat and one of the Italian front, featuring the Balkan and Italian theatres of war.
Vols. V–VI: Continue the general campaign narrative through 1916–17.
Vols. VII–VIII: Cover the later war years, focusing on 1917–18.
Vols. IX–X: These volumes cover the war's final phase and the Armistice. Publication of the last volumes continued into the early 1920s, covering the peace settlement at Versailles and its aftermath.