Jules Verne - Michael Strogoff - 1877

VERNE, Jules
Michael Strogoff, The Courier of the Czar
New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 743 and 745 Broadway, n.d. [c. 1877/1880]. American translation by W. H. G. Kingston, revised by Julius Chambers.

One octavo volume, in the publisher's original full green cloth binding, upper cover stamped with a blind-stamped design and gilt lettering, spine with raised bands and finely detailed gilt motifs depicting a telegraph, the arms of the Russian Empire, and the Siberian tarantass (Scribners at foot).

Deluxe edition, lavishly illustrated with 90 full-page wood engravings after the original drawings by French artists (Férat, Barbant, etc.).

A sumptuous American edition of Jules Verne's masterpiece, published by the celebrated Charles Scribner's Sons in New York. Presented in its original publisher's binding in fir-green cloth, this copy features the canonical translation by W. H. G. Kingston, revised by Julius Chambers.

This volume stands out for the spectacular quality of its illustrations: 90 full-page engravings tracing Michel Strogoff's epic journey from Moscow to Irkutsk through insurgent Siberia. The gilt work on the publisher's spine (depicting the carriage and Russian imperial symbols with exceptional delicacy) gives the book a striking shelf presence for enthusiasts of the master of the novel of anticipation and the nineteenth-century adventure novel.

Michel Strogoff is one of the few novels in the Extraordinary Voyages in which geography and history wholly prevail over science fiction. To describe the Siberian steppes, the crossing of the Urals, and Tatar customs so accurately without ever having set foot there, Jules Verne drew on research from his friend, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, and the diplomat and traveler Pierre de Tchihatcheff. When it was published in 1876, its success in the United States and England was so meteoric that Scribner's illustrated editions became the must-have Christmas gifts for American bibliophiles of the Victorian era.