Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

VERNE, Jules.

Item Number: 146145

Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873.

First edition, first issue of Verne’s classic adventure novel with “The End” printed on page 303, the central jellyfish vignette (which was later changed to Captain Nemo using a sextant) to the front panel and the final ‘s’ in ‘Seas’ lacking from the titles to the front panel. Octavo, original green cloth decorated in gilt, illustrated with 109 plates, including tissue-guarded frontispiece and two maps, brown endpapers. In very good condition with light rubbing and wear to the extremities. It is speculated that only a small number of the Osgood copies were printed, the majority of which were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of November 9, 1872. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 copies may still exist today in green, brown, and blue cloth.

"Twenty Thousand Leagues owed much to the exploits of the huge experimental French submarine Le Plongeur and to the work of Verne’s friend Jacques-François Conseil, who developed a steam-driven submarine and whose surname Verne gave to Professor Arronax’s servant in the story" (Carpenter & Prichard, 557). Verne combined science and invention with fast-paced adventure. Some of Verne's fiction has also become fact: his submarine Nautilus predated the first successful power submarine by a quarter century, and his spaceship predicted the development a century later. The first all-electric submarine, built in 1886, was named Nautilus in honor of Verne's vessel. The first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1955, was named Nautilus, too. The film version was produced by Walt Disney in 1954 and directed by Richard Fleischer, won an Oscar for its special effects.