1896 Rare Book - JULES VERNE - From the Earth to the Moon, Direct in 97 hours 20 minutes.

 

(Description) 

Author: Jules Verne. Translated from the French by Louis Mercier, and Eleanor E. King.
Title: From the Earth to the Moon, direct in 97 hours 20 minutes: [Bound with] and a trip round it.  With numerous illustrations. 
Publisher: London, Sampson Low, Marston & Company, Limited., 1896. Tenth Edition (stated).
Language: Text in English.
Size: 7.5 " X 5 ".
Pages: VI-323 pages.
Binding: Very good original decorated full-cloth binding (hinges fine, overall slightly worn and scuffed - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content (bright, tight, and clean, some light foxing or staining - as shown).
Illustrations: Complete with the nice frontispiece and 25 very nice full-page illustrations.

Estimate: (Scarce with no or few copies in this binding variant available for sale worldwide).

The book: Scarce binding variant and attractive edition of From the Earth to the Moon (French: De la terre à la lune) -- an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people—the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet—in a projectile with the goal of a moon landing. The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer muzzle would have been required to reach escape velocity while limiting acceleration to survivable limits for the passengers.

The author: Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).