Paul d'Ivoi - Jean Fanfare - 1897

Paul d’Ivoi. Jean Fanfare.

92 engravings in the text and 10 large compositions, 8 color illustrations by Lucien Métivet.
Paris, Ancienne librairie Furne, Société d’édition et de Librairie, collection Les voyages excentriques. SD (1897). In-4. 440 pages. Publisher's binding in red percaline with a histoirated “to the locomotive” motif with polychrome decoration. Souze plate. Beveled boards, gilded edges.

First edition in binding. First cover with luminous gold, but numerous epidermures on the covers, especially the second cover (see photos), spine faded, corners and headcaps creased. Interior and endpapers solid, nice gutter, some usual foxing, specks on endpapers.

Paul d’Ivoi asserts himself with Jean Fanfare as the worthy heir of Jules Verne, while emancipating from his rigor with a keen sense of melodrama and the serialized novel. The plot opens with a shock: Jean Fanfare discovers at the Louvre that the ancient statue of “Diana of the Archipelago” is none other than the body of his fiancée Nali, frozen by a jealous sculptor through a criminal aluminium galvanization process. A one-month race around the world to break this lethargy and save the young woman then ensues. The comparison with Jules Verne is here striking: where the author of The Extraordinary Voyages at Hetzel would have built his tale around purely technical feasibility and the geology of the archipelago, Paul d’Ivoi uses science as a mere marvellous pretext in the service of suspense, an intensely romantic plot and breathless action. Moreover, the author injects into his narrative a heroic romance and a central role given to courageous female characters, contrasting with Verne’s often more masculine and austere worlds.

A somewhat uncommon binding with a first cover centered on anticipation…