Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Illustrated Editions

I recently purchased the Oxford World's Classics edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and am moderately chagrined to discover that it holds no illustrations. I should have expected this; I narrowly avoided making the same mistake with the OWC edition of Lewis Carrol's Alice. Édouard Riou is every bit as indispensable as Tenniel. I like the design of the new OWC line, but the omission of classic illustrations may cause me to abandon it.

After a quick search, I discovered an Illustrated Collector's Edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth but cannot find anything similar for Leagues. It is difficult to compare various editions online, and none stands out to me for this purpose. I would like to own a copy printed expressly to reproduce the classic illustrations in high quality.

Can anyone here recommend an illustrated edition of Leagues, especially one that might be described as collector's or gift quality?

British Library were selling 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Pop-up Book at their recent science fiction exhibition. I beleive it's generally available at on-line retailers everywhere. The giant squid is especailly fine. ;-)

I own The Heritage Press of edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea published in 1956. It has 20 full page and 12 smaller illustrations hand-colored by Edward A. Wilson. The translation (important to many people) is by Mercier Lewis and it has a new introduction by Fletcher Pratt.

Can the book be in french ? The various early Hetzel editions are the source of most of the illustrated versions made, a good condition copy would certainly qualify as a collector's item.

I think Hachette released toward the end of the 70' and beginning of the 80' a "Grandes Oeuvres" series with those illustrations too, haven't held one so I wouldn't know about the quality.

#1 internisus

If you want to own a quality edition of any book the place to look for it is at Abe Books. This is a major go-to website for used book sellers for two reasons. One is to determine the price of a book that has come into their possession and the other is to post the fact that they have a book for sale. The description of each book is given in great detail about the publisher, condition and type of illustrations and illustrator/engraver...etc..

With respect to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne you can see that you can spend $20,000 for a first edition or as low as $1.00 for a poor copy of no particular significance. There are a total of 2065 books of varying prices for sale...I am sure you can find one that meets your price range and illustration requirements.

Here is the website with the search criteria already applied for you.

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Jules+Verne&sortby=1&tn...

I have no association with this site other than the fact I have used it many times to find out the value of an old book that I have discovered in a garage sale, second hand shop or auction lot. It is an amazing resource for a book lover.

5: Lynxear

Probably a better source for finding the value of books is www.bookfinder.com which shows you the price at a bunch of different sites including Abe Books.

Both Bookfinder and ABE Books are owned by Amazon (although they were once independent)

6 cosmicdolphin

Perhaps you are right but I have found Abe Books quite adequate. Probably there is a lot of cross-pollination of prices between them. I have never used Bookfinder so I cannot comment..... I have just taken a look at this site and I think I would still prefer Abe Books .... there were more hits for used versions of this book and the descriptions of the book and its condition were more comprehensive on Abe Books....but certainly both and perhaps other sources could be consulted.

I don't sell books now but 25 years ago I was involved in selling used and out of print books in a flea market setting. When the internet became a reality it certainly made pricing and researching old books easier and Abe Books was my place of choice when it arrived...I guess I just stuck with it.