A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
New York: Scribner Armstrong and Co., 1874 [but actually 1873].
First American edition, first printing of one of Jules Verne's most famous novels. Published autumn 1873 but dated to the coming year on the title page. viii, 384 pp., illustrated with 52 wood engravings. Bound in publisher's orange-red cloth with pictorial stamping in black and gilt, peach endpapers. Near Fine with light wear and soiling to covers with small bump to upper corner of front board, and foxing to textblock edges. Hinges just starting. Pencil ownership inscription dated 1874 to front free endpaper, overopened at several places. Taves & Michaluk V002.
A bright copy of the first American edition of the science fiction classic. Professor Lidenbrock, infamously renamed "Hardwigg" by an anoymous translator who took great liberties with the text, discovers a runic manuscript that reveals a volcanic entrance into the earth's core. He grabs his nephew and an Icelander named Hans and carries them off into the bowels of the earth, where they discover a lost world of living dinosaurs before making the perilous journey back to the surface.
Verne was already a household name in America, and reviewers showered praise on his latest offering, illlustrated by Edouard Riou and attractively bound as a gift book. The Chicago Post declared that the book was "one of the most successful he has yet written, possessing in a high degree the wonderful invention and strong characterization which have made his novels famous." The novel has never been out of print and has been adapted several times for film and television.
Price: $18,500