El Anacronópete.

£4,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The rare first of edition of Enrique Gaspar’s El Anacronópete , widely considered to be the first novel to depict a time travel machine, preceding H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine by eight years - complete with the very rare and striking original publisher’s pictorial cloth. Depictions of time travel in fiction prior to the late nineteenth century usually involved means such as Rip Van Winkle’s deep, alcohol induced sleep or the supernatural as with the spirits of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In this type of narrative, the characters have no control over the mechanism of time travel and are usually victims of an unexpected occurrence. The earliest appearance of time travel by means of a mechanical device was in Edward Page Mitchell’s short story ‘The Clock That Went Backwards’, published in the New York Sun newspaper in 1881, in which a very old stopped clock, when wound, goes backwards rather than forwards. However, the protagonists in the story have no control over the time travel and the actual mechanics of time travel remain ambiguous. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895 and coined the very term ‘time machine’ but was in itself based on an earlier short story by him titled ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ published in 1888, only a year after the publication of Gaspar’s El Anacronópete . El Anacronópete therefore contains the earliest depiction of a mechanical vessel engineered to travel back in time. And yet, the appearance of several such depictions in quic

• Year: 1887

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