All Quiet on the Western Front (First English Edition, Seventh Impression)

Retains the rare original dust jacket, unclipped and in beautiful condition!

REMARQUE, Erich Maria (trans. A. W. Wheen). All Quiet on the Western Front. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1929.

Octavo. Original oatmeal cloth boards, titled in dark green to front cover and spine. Original dark green paper dust jacket, unclipped. Top edge tinted green to match jacket. 320 pp. First edition in English / first UK edition, seventh impression.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) drew directly on his own experience as an eighteen-year-old German conscript on the Western Front to write Im Westen Nichts Neues, first serialised in the Vossische Zeitung in late 1928 before its German book publication in January 1929. This English translation by A. W. Wheen, published by Putnam in London in March 1929 (preceding the American first edition by three months) brought Remarque's unflinching, deliberately unglamorous account of trench warfare to an English-speaking readership within weeks of the German original.

The response was immediate and overwhelming: it sold some 2.5 million copies in twenty-two languages within its first eighteen months in print. A contemporary Putnam publisher's advertisement for the title, cited in the trade, called it plainly "the greatest of all war novels... the simplest, the starkest, and the most beautiful war book that has yet been written... the war memorial of all the 'unknown soldiers.'"

All Quiet on the Western Front is universally regarded as the single most significant literary work to emerge from the First World War, and one of the most important anti-war novels in any language. Its stripped, unsentimental prose style and its refusal to grant the war any redemptive or heroic meaning shaped the whole subsequent tradition of war literature that followed it. The book's notoriety extended well beyond ordinary literary reception: it was among the books publicly burned by the Nazi regime in 1933, and Remarque himself was stripped of his German citizenship and forced into exile, first to Switzerland and later to the United States, for the remainder of his life.

The original dark green paper dust jackets issued with this first UK edition are notoriously fragile and prone to fading and toning, making surviving examples in genuinely well-preserved condition — as with this copy — increasingly scarce.

Very good in near fine dust jacket. Dust jacket in wonderful condition, colour well preserved. Some mild rubbing and creasing along edges. A few minor markings to cloth boards. Volume has foxing along edges. Contents very good–near fine. Some toning to endpapers, and some scattered markings sporadically throughout. Otherwise, clean and bright throughout. Previous owners inscription to front pastedown.

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Catalogue Number: HH000708