The Mysterious Island Trilogy: Dropped From the Clouds, Abandoned, and The Secret of the Island.

VERNE, Jules.

$5,000.00

Item Number: 146148

New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co, 1875.

First editions in English of each volume in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island trilogy. Octavo, three volumes in the original publisher’s pictorial cloth, all edges gilt, illustrated with engravings including tissue-guarded frontispieces. Translated from the French by W.H.G. Kingston. Each volume is in very good condition.

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.