Five Weeks in a Balloon - Every Saturday; First Verne English Appearance

Boston: Fields & Osgood, 1868. 1st Edition . Hardcover. Good Plus. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. Boston: Fields & Osgood, 1868 [hardbound Volume 6, July to December 1868 of the magazine]. Taves & Michaluk V001. 10.25" x 6.75", 828 pp. Ex-Tacoma Public Library; half black calf with marbled paper boards. Quite scuffed, particularly at the corners and hinges. Pages are age toned, some are wrinkled, one page is torn but complete [not a page within the Verne issue]. Strongly bound. Somewhat worn (see scans) but still quite strong, better than Good, just short of very good by reason of one or two too many scuffs. Fascinating and quite rare Jules Verne English-language first/first. Just a few pages buried within this hefty collection of six months of Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading - a Fields & Osgood double-column weekly issue - treat Verne's first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. At the time, the magazine editors were apparently of the opinion that Verne [who was then largely unknown to the American public] was describing actual events, rather than fictitious ones, in his tale of African adventures undertaken via the vehicle of a hot-air balloon. Here, in the five pages of this first appearance (see scan of the first one), only certain passages of the novel occur, along with a synopsis by the apparently intrigued editor, who concludes with the line: "All I can say is, that it was shameful of our newspapers, which profess to record everything that passes, to treat this important event with such utter silence." Verne is even mis-identified by the flummoxed staff, who refer to him as "M. Jules Berne." For this title, this piece is exceeded in English-language rarity only by its own softbound variant - i.e., the same piece not bound together in six-monthly tomes such as this, which was the habit of the era, which few have presumably largely perished. Taves & Michaluk at V001 note that "The London" sourcing reference for the Verne article remains unknown. See all scans. L53n