FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It. Translated from the French by Louis Mercier, M.A. (Oxon) and Eleanor E. King. With Eighty Full Page Illustrations. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company, 1874. Original terra-cotta cloth pictorially decorated in black and gilt, beveled boards.
First American Edition of this tale that had originally been published in France as two separate books (DE LA TERRE A LA LUNE in 1865, and AUTOUR DE LA LUNE in 1870). This tale was also (later) published as THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, for that is where the story begins...
The story opens with a history of the "Gun Club" established at Baltimore by our veteran inventors and artillerists, disgusted with the close of a gigantic war entailing the cessation of their tremendous experiments. The firiest of them are about to emigrate when a trumpet summons from their Club President Barbican... The grand assemblage; Barbican's speech; his stunning proposition; the enthusiasm it awakens...; the selection of a site for the mammoth gun, 900 feet long, 9 feet interior diameter and 6 feet thickness of metal at the muzzle...; the firing of the Columbiad; its terrific effect, and the astounding result -- all these are detailed with a power, point, condition and 'spirituel' wit that carry the reader on, from chapter to chapter, in a trance of intellectual delight, not unmingled with supreme astonishment at its ingenuity. [from "the earliest American editorial about Verne," cited in T&M]
This copy is in terra-cotta cloth (other copies are in numerous other colors, without priority); it does not have four pages of ads at the end (priority if any, unknown). It is in near-fine condition (the slightest of wear at the extremities, a bit of very faint speckling of the cloth near the fore-edge, original endpapers cracking just a little). Quite a bright copy. Taves & Michaluk V003 & V007; Edwards 3 & 7; Myers 26. Item #15216
Price: $1,950.00