Read the blog post: [ Ссылка ]
Search for this edition on eBay US: [ Ссылка ]
Search for this edition on eBay UK: [ Ссылка ]
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is Jules Verne’s classic tale of nautical adventure, originally published in serial form between 1869 and 1870. This edition was published by the Limited Editions Club in 1956 as number 268, part of the twenty fifth series. The translation into English from the original French is by Mercier Lewis. The book has an introduction by Fletcher Pratt and was illustrated by Edward A. Wilson. In common with other Limited Editions Club volumes of the era, the book was limited to 1,500 copies (I have number 156) and bears a colophon signed by the illustrator.
The book is quarto sized and presented in a plain tan-coloured slipcase that is made from heavy-duty board and feels quite sturdy. The spine of the slipcase bears a label identifying the book and author.
The volume is quarter bound in green leather with gold labelling on the spine. The front an back boards are covered in paper with a design by the illustrator. End papers also bear a large design of the Nautilus, the submarine that almost qualifies as the book’s main protagonist. The top edge of the text block is stained green. the paper feels heavy, quite pliable, and slightly coarse—in short, it feels like a nice rag paper. The paper also seems to have taken the text very well.
The text is printed letterpress with chapter titles picked-out in a rust orange colour. Each chapter begins with a stylised drop cap in the same rust orange. The book was printed at the Plantin Press in Los Angeles.
The volume is liberally illustrated with Wilson’s drawings, including a particularly striking frontispiece that faces an elegantly understated title page. Besides the frontispiece and end papers, there are seventeed full page illustrations and fourteen smaller ones. All illustrations were hand-coloured in the studio of Martha Berrien.
Verne, of course was a pioneer of science fiction—essentially inventing a sub-genre of sci-fi characterised by the use of real science to lend plausibility to the imagined. His works are also thrilling adventures in the best Victoria tradition, and Twenty Thousand Leagues is no exception.
I should make special mention of Fletcher Pratt’s introduction to this edition, which does an unusually good job of setting the novel in context and articulating what it is that makes Verne’s work a little bit magical. But it was Verne himself that expressed it best: "Thus may this inexplicable phenomenon be explained, unless there be something over and above all that one has ever conjectured, seen, perceived, or experienced; which is just within the bounds of possibility."
Filmed on my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k with a Panasonic Lumix 12-35mm f/2.8 lens.
