ALAMEIN TO ZEM ZEM: With Poems and Drawings.

First edition, first printing. Quarter red cloth over grey paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean. Uniform toning to pages owing to the poor quality paper stock. The red cloth on the spine is faded to the upper and lower edges, the gilt a little darkened / tarnished. The mildly toned and spotted dustwrapper is darkened to the spine (spreading to the rear panel), rubbed to folds, with an area of loss to the lower and upper edges of the spine (c. 1.5 cm and 0.5 cm, respectively), and some minor loss (c. 0.5 cm) and associated tearing to the upper edge of the front panel. Not price-clipped, the original 10/6 price covered with the publisher's 8/6 net label. A very presentable copy of the scarce first edition in the famously fragile wrapper.

"Just before the battle of El Alamein in 1942", the jacket copy explains, "Keith Douglas ran away from a safe staff job to rejoin his old regiment in the Western desert. This book is the record, with a few names changed, of his battle experience as a junior tank officer up to the fall of Tunis". Desmond Graham, in his biography of the poet (Oxford, 1974), notes how Douglas, "[a]waiting his return to the regiment in Cairo at the beginning of May [1942] had bought a desk diary from Boileau and Caloghiris' bookshop". 'Alamein to Zem Zem' was written in this diary (not, however, in the form of a diary; Douglas wrote to his mother that "keeping a diary [...] is something I could never do"). In addition to its vivid prose, the volume contains Douglas' Middle East poems as well as a number of his drawings and paintings (including three colour plates). The Spectator review described it as "throughout the work of a poet, and the only book of the late war comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden". The book was reissued by Faber and Faber in 1966, with an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.