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From the Earth to the Moon
New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company, 1874. Item #06270
First Obtainable American Edition - Verne’s 'From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Round It'
VERNE, Jules. From the Earth to the Moon. Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And A Trip Round It. Translated from the French by Louis Mercier… and Eleanor E. King. With eighty full page illustrations. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company, 1874.
First American illustrated edition, and the first obtainable American edition of one of Verne’s most celebrated works, combining De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and its sequel Autour de la Lune (1870).
Octavo (7 3/4 x 5 1/8 in.; 197 x 130 mm). viii, [1]-323, [1, blank] pp., plus 4 pp. publisher’s advertisements. With 80 inserted plates by Bayard, de Montaut, and de Neuville (including the frontispiece with tissue guard). Verso of title page with ad for single Verne title: "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth" priced at $2.00. Light stain in blank inner margin of pp. 40/41 caused by small strip of brown paper.
Publisher’s beveled-edge, horizontally-ribbed red-orange cloth, front cover and spine richly decorated and lettered in gilt and black, brown coated endpapers. George W. Alexander, New York, binder’s ticket on rear paste-down. Contemporary pencil inscription dated "Jan 1 1874" on recto of front blank. Very light wear at spine tips (three tiny tears at crown), otherwise an excellent, near fine copy.
A lovely survival of a major Verne title in striking American trade cloth. In addition to its importance as a landmark of nineteenth-century science fiction, the narrative contains extraordinary anticipations of later spaceflight, including uncanny parallels to the Apollo program.
The Scribner, Armstrong edition is the first illustrated American edition and the first obtainable in commerce, the true first (Newark Printing and Publishing Company, 1869, in wrappers) surviving in only one known copy (Library of Congress). This translation by Mercier and King, originally prepared for Sampson Low in London, was slightly revised for American publication.
In From the Earth to the Moon… and A trip Round It, Jules Verne imagines the bold scheme of the Baltimore Gun Club to launch a projectile to the moon. Led by the visionary Impey Barbicane, the club constructs a massive space gun in Florida and recruits adventurous companions - Captain Nicholl and the French traveler Michel Ardan - for the unprecedented voyage. The narrative blends scientific speculation with high-spirited adventure, dramatizing the technical challenges of space travel while satirizing post-Civil War American enthusiasm for grandiose engineering.
Verne’s imaginative leap, from orbital mechanics to the choice of Florida as the launch site, anticipated with uncanny accuracy many aspects of twentieth-century space exploration, making these works cornerstones of early science fiction.
References: Edwards 3 & 7; Gondolo della Riva 10 & 14; Michaluk V003 & V007; Myers 26.
Price: $3,500.00