1895 Rare Edition of Jules Verne's Book - A Floating City and the Blockade Runners
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(Description)
Author: Jules Verne
Title: A Floating City and the Blockade Runners.
Publisher: London, Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1895. (Complete 2 books bound together).
Language: Text in English
Size: 7.5" X 5.5".
Pages: 208-120 pages.
Binding: Attractive and very good original illustrated full-cloth binding (hinges fine, overall slightly worn and scuffed - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content (bright and tight, some light foxing - as shown, inner hinge's staples lightly rusted in the second part of the volume - as shown, partially erased name of a previous owner in the first endpaper - as shown).
Illustrations: Complete with all the nice 42 full-page illustrations.
The book: Attractive and rare edition of this volume which consists 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).