Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (First UK Edition)

A$10,000 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

VERNE, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1873. Octavo. Later quarter charcoal morocco and blue cloth. Spine lettered in gilt with five raised bands. Top edge gilt. Frontispiece, viii, 303 pp., 109 illustrations throughout after drawings by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou, 8 pp. publisher's advertisements to rear reading: ". First edition in English — the first edition in any language other than French. Printed late 1872, title page dated 1873 as called for. 109-illustration variant with the associated indication points. Inscription to front free endpaper in ink: "To Jimmy, With love from Daddy. Xmas 1949." Originally published as Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in the French periodical Magasin d'éducation et de récréation between 1869 and 1870, this English translation was done by Verne himself and published first in the UK in 1872-3. An immediate hit, this work grew to become one of Verne's most important and left a lasting legacy upon the world. First editions of this work are arguably the scarcest and most collectible among all of Verne's works. The novel gave Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus to the literature of adventure and imagination, and in doing so helped to define a new kind of fiction in which the wonders of science and technology were not merely backdrop but the very substance of the story. Famously, Verne did not simply predict the submarine; he created a romanticism around the concept and h

• Binding: Hardcover

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