Books

Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873. First American edition, from the British sheets; first binding. Wood-engraved frontispiece with tissue guard, and 109 wood-engraved plates, by Hildibrand after Edouard Riou and Alphonse de Neuville. viii, 303, [1, blank] pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Original salmon pink silk-grained cloth, spine and front cover lettered and pictorially blocked in gilt and black within decorative frames, front cover with the jellyfish vignette, lower board stamped in blind, brown endpapers. Spine ever so lightly faded, light circular stain to upper board cover, faintest rubbing to extremities. Near fine. A very attractive copy. First American edition, from the British sheets; first binding. Wood-engraved frontispiece with tissue guard, and 109 wood-engraved plates, by Hildibrand after Edouard Riou and Alphonse de Neuville. viii, 303, [1, blank] pp. 1 vols. 8vo. This first American edition of Verne’s classic science fiction novel of maritime adventure was printed from…

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, published in 1870. The story tells of Captain Nemo and the underwater adventures of his submarine, the Nautilus, as it goes around the world beneath the sea.

First editions will be in French and have been published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel with the title 'Vingt mille lieues sous les mers'. Later editions are often titled 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. The first edition in English was published in November 1872 (but is dated 1873 to the title page and the publisher’s catalogue dated as 1872) which is before the more usual American first edition published by James Osgood in Boston in 1873.