1886 Rare Victorian Book - JULES VERNE FUR COUNTRY or Seventy Degrees North Latitude

 

(description)

Author : Jules Verne
Title :  The FUR COUNTRY or Seventy Degrees North Latitude.
Publisher : London, Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1886. Complete 2 parts with their own title page bound together.
Language : Text in English
Size : 7.5 " X 5 " 
Pages : 334 pages.
Binding : Very good  and very attractive full Victorian decorated cloth binding (hinges fine, overall slightly worn and scuffed) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content : Very good content (bright, tight and clean, School award plate on front paste-down, with rubber stamp dated 1897). 
Illustration : Profusely and nicely illustrated.

Estimate: (USD 150 - USD 300)

The book : Rare and attractive edition of The Fur Country (French: Le Pays des fourrures) -- an adventure novel by Jules Verne in The Extraordinary Voyages series, first published in 1873. The novel was serialized in Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation from September 1872 to December 1873. The two-volume first original French edition and the first illustrated large-format edition were published in 1873. The first English translation by N. D’Anvers (pseudonym of Mrs. Arthur (Nancy) Bell) was also published in 1873.

Plot Summary : In 1859 Lt. Jasper Hobson and other members of the Hudson's Bay Company travel through the Northwest Territories of Canada to Cape Bathurst on the Arctic Ocean on the mission to create a fort at 70 degrees, north of the Arctic Circle. The area they come to is very rich with wildlife and natural resources. Jasper Hobson and his party establish a fort here. At some point, an earthquake occurs, and from then on, laws of physics seem altered (a total eclipse happens to be only partial; tides are not perceived anymore). They eventually realise that they are on an iceberg separated from the sea ice that is drifting south. Hobson does a daily measurement to know the iceberg's location. The iceberg passes the Bering Strait and the iceberg (which is now much smaller, since the warmer waters have melted some parts) finally reaches a small island. A Danish whaling ship finds them. Every member in Hobson's party is rescued and they all survive.

 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).