Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front, a rare presentation copy

Remarque, Erich Maria

All Quiet on the Western Front. London: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1929

8vo (186 x 124 mm). Half-title; preliminary leaves toned with some offsetting, text block shaken, a few stray stains, mostly to margins, last few leaves toned. Publisher's oatmeal cloth lettered in green to upper cover and spine, top stained blue; upper cover and fore edge stained at lower right corner, spine sunned and frayed at foot. Pictorial jacket printed in red, black, and blue with a rat atop a skull and helmet, with "German Opinions" to front flap; spine faintly sunned and with some chips at head and foot, small tears with some loss at extremities. Housed in a custom clamshell case.

Later printing (July 1929) of Remarque's anti-war classic, in a variant pictorial dust jacket.

Inscribed to the front free endpaper in German in the year of publication: "Herrn Dr. Carnes Weeks / Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Berlin, 12. Okt. 1929 / Erich Maria Remarque [Dr. Carnes Weeks / With best wishes / Berlin, 12. Oct[ober]. 1929 / Erich Maria Remarque]."

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it," Remarque boldly proclaims opposite from the copyright page. "It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war."

It is possible that the inscription is to Dr. Carnes Weeks of New York, who served as a senior attending surgeon at Bellevue Hospital and taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the first half of the twentieth century. Weeks was a witness to the effects of war, serving as a specialist in gunshot wounds of the chest and later as the medical advisor of the American Scandinavian Field Hospital, which sought to aid soldiers during the Second World War. While there are no direct ties between Weeks and Remarque or Berlin, it also appears that he was best man at the wedding of legendary world-champion boxer Gene Tunney; indeed, in December 1929, Tunney returned from his fifteen-month honeymoon tour of Europe, and Weeks greeted the newlyweds on the pier. Perhaps the present lot was a present brought back from those travels.

Inscribed copies of Remarque's works are rare—Rare Book Hub records approximately seven signed copies at auction, of which five were inscribed.

REFERENCES

"Hospital Formed to Help Finland," The New York Times, 11 February 1940, https://www.nytimes.com/1940/02/11/archives/hospital-formed-to-help-finland-american-scandinavian-field-unit.html, accessed online 21 May 2026; "Tunney Returns, Chats on Fighters," The New York Times, 4 December 1929, https://www.nytimes.com/1929/12/04/archives/tunney-returns-chats-on-fighters-but-exchampion-indicates-his.html, accessed online 21 May 2026

PROVENANCE

Dr. Carnes Weeks (inscription to front free endpaper)