1874 Scarce First Edition Jules Verne - A Floating City and the Blockade Runners Illustrated.
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Author: Jules Verne.
Title: A Floating City and the Blockade Runners.
Publisher: London, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, Searle, 1874. First UK Edition.
Language: Text in English.
Size : 7.5 " X 5.5 ".
Pages : ìv-286 pages + 40 pages of catalogue dated August 1874.
Binding: Attractive, scarce, and good illustrated full cloth binding (hinges fine, overall worn and scuffed - as shown, spine sunned - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Good content (bright and tight, some foxing and stating throughout - as shown, inner joints of endpaper worn but tight - as shown, small tear nicely repaired by a previous owner in the lower margin of page 31 - as shown). All edges gilt.
Illustrations: Complete with all the 42 full-page illustrations.
Estimate: (USD 700 - USD 1300)
The book: Rare First UK edition of this Jules Verne book consisting of two separate tales. The first is a fictionalized narrative of Verne's 1867 passage from Liverpool to New York aboard "The Great Eastern," the largest iron ship ever built and one of the wonders of its age. Her length was 692 feet, her beam was 120, her paddlewheels and propeller were larger than anything the ocean had ever seen, and she was designed to carry more passengers than the Queen Mary. Because of her size, "The Great Eastern" was the only ship capable of laying the great Atlantic Cable. The second tale is fictional, more in Verne's usual style: a Glasgow shipowner devises an adventurous plan to run the Union blockade of southern ports during the American Civil War, in order to bring a load of cotton back to his city's 25,000 idle looms.
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).