Jules Verne - [Rarissime première édition in-18] Le Docteur Ox - 1874

VERNE, Jules.
The Doctor Ox, Master Zacharius, A Wintering in the Ice, A Drama in the Air.
Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, [1874].
A volume in 18mo. Contemporary binding in red half-leather, spine with five raised bands ornamented by compartments and gold fillets, title and author labels, boards of marbled paper, speckled edges.

Exceptional and very rare first edition in-18 of this major volume in the Voyages Extraordinaires, published by J. Hetzel et Cie. This opus unites four foundational texts of Vernian imagination, blending the fantastic and scientific anticipation: The Doctor Ox, Master Zacharius, A Wintering in the Ice, and A Drama in the Air. A copy solidly and elegantly dressed in a handcrafted red half-chagrin binding of the period, bearing witness to the zeal of the first readers for Jules Verne’s work. Interior well preserved.

Published in a single volume in 1874 under the famous Hetzel collection banner, The Doctor Ox remains one of the author’s most delicious satires. The action unfolds in the tranquil Flemish town of Quiquendone, where the inhabitants, of legendary slowness, see their lives upended by the installation of lighting with pure oxygen orchestrated by the eccentric Doctor Ox. The experiment turns into a monumental psychological farce when the oxygen over-stimulates the minds, transforming placid citizens into a furious and quarrelsome mob.

This visionary text on the excesses of scientific experimentation has had its moment in the spotlight beyond the page. Jules Verne himself undertook its theatrical adaptation alongside Alfred Delacour and Victor Wilder to create an operetta-bouffe. Set to music by Jacques Offenbach, The Doctor Ox was lavishly premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés in 1877. This unlikely union between the rigor of Vernian proto-science fiction and Offenbach’s melodic madness offered Paris one of the most unorthodox and discussed spectacles of the decade.