The Mysterious Island: The Secret of the Island.

VERNE, Jules.

$1,750.00

Item Number: 126775

New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1876.

First American edition of the final installment in Verne’s Mysterious Island Trilogy. Octavo, original publisher’s green cloth decorated in gilt, illustrated. Translated from the French by W.H.G. Kingston. In very good condition with rubbing to the spine extremities. A very bright example.

Often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction", French novelist Jules Verne had a wide influence on on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. 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). Verne's The Mysterious Island is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways, though its themes are vastly different from those books. An early draft of the novel, initially rejected by Verne's publisher and wholly reconceived before publication, was titled Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson, indicating the influence of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Johann David Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson on the thematic structure of the trilogy. In September of 1875, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle published the first British edition of Mysterious Island in three volumes entitled Dropped from the Clouds, The Abandoned, and The Secret of the Island. The trilogy has been adapted numerous times for film, television, and radio broadcast.