Name: Jules Verne's Les Voyages Extraordinaires
Author: Jules Verne

Ex Carta

Cover for 'The Golden Volcano'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Golden Volcano'

Cover for 'The Thompson Travel Agency' written by Michael Verne

Title page and illustrations for for 'The Thompson Travel Agency' written by Michael Verne

Cover for 'The Chase of the Golden Meteor' and 'The Danube Pilot'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Chase of the Golden Meteor' and 'The Danube Pilot'

Cover for 'The Survivors of the "Jonathan"'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Survivors of the "Jonathan"'

Cover for 'The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz' and 'Yesterday and Tomorrow'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz' and 'Yesterday and Tomorrow'

Cover for 'The Barsac Mission'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Barsac Mission'

Cover for 'Travel Scholarships'

Title page for 'Travel Scholarships'

Page of maps of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea

Cover for 'The Invasion of the Sea' and 'The Lighthouse at the End of the World'

Title page for 'The Invasion of the Sea'

Complete set of first editions: 65 works in 47 volumes. 35 of the volumes contain a total of 47 maps. Designed by Jean Engel, for the Christmas and New Year's market.

Volumes I - X

Volumes XI - XX

Volumes XXI - XXX

Volumes XXXI - XL

Volumes XLI - XLVIII

 was integral to the Voyages Extraordinaires. Of the forty-seven volumes in the Hetzel editions, thirty novels contain maps, amounting to forty-two engraved plates. Some were produced directly from Verne’s own sketches, as in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras. These maps often blend real and imaginary geographies: polar regions dotted with fictional settlements, or sea charts that trace invented voyages across recognisable oceans. On occasion Verne even presented himself as expedition cartographer, signing maps with dates that coincided with his characters’ fictional journeys rather than his own authorship. Such devices collapse the boundary between narrative and representation, making the maps not ancillary but constitutive of the fictional world. Taken together, the maps, illustrations, and texts create a multimedia exploration of earth and cosmos that fulfilled Hetzel’s encyclopaedic ambition while retaining Verne’s distinctive literary artistry.

, dozens of engraved maps accompany the tales, many drawn from the author’s own sketches. These maps integrate scientific precision with imaginative speculation, making real geography an engine of narrative fabulation.

Conceived in collaboration with his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), the

 sought, in his words, ‘to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, historical and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science, and to recount it in an entertaining and picturesque format.’ Verne’s novels combined narrative propulsion with scrupulous detail, spanning subterranean, maritime, polar, aerial, and even cosmic frontiers. Classics such as 

 (1872) epitomise the series’ imaginative scope.

Though Hetzel cast the project as an encyclopaedia of science, Verne himself insisted on its literary ambition: ‘My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe … and to realise a very high ideal of style.’ His deft interweaving of narrative voice, technical exposition, and vivid description gave the novels a durability far beyond the confines of contemporary popular fiction.

Between 1863 and Verne’s death in 1905, fifty-four volumes appeared, with a further eight issued posthumously from drafts completed by his son, Michel. The first to bear the series title was 

L’Étonnante aventure de la mission Barsac

 (1919), entirely Michel’s work. Each title was released in multiple formats: serialised in 

Hetzel’s Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation

, issued as unillustrated éditions originales in octodecimo, and finally published in the lavish large-octavo cartonnages dorés et colorés designed by Jean Engel. These deluxe bindings, aimed at the gift market, incorporated the serial illustrations along with additional plates, maps, and diagrams.

Verne was the most translated author of his time and remains one of the most influential figures in science fiction and adventure writing. His writing charts ‘the continuity between the nineteenth-century tradition of scientific romance and twentieth-century science fiction’ (Smyth, 2000). A lifelong devotee of geography and cartography, he kept an extensive library of atlases and journals, and maintained a globe in his study on which he traced his characters’ itineraries (Clute and Eggeling, nd)

His grandson recalled that Verne often consulted German atlases while drafting, and annotated maps himself to plot his fictions; in this he both anticipated and helped to pioneer a mode of world-building more commonly associated with J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), and continued by contemporary writers such as Marlon James (b.1970 ) and Ken Liu (b.1976). Verne’s style of narrative fantasy grounded in the specific, emerging technologies of the industrial age remains a touchstone for the entire steampunk genre, across novels, films, anime, manga, and gaming.

Travel, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, is the core appeal of Verne’s works. It is no coincidence that the great age of exploration was, in fact, coming to an end by the last stages of the 19th century. The world had been mostly explored, and Verne’s fictions tapped into the sub stratum of human desire that there be mysterious places still to uncover. Another way of putting this would be to say that Verne created an imaginative space into which the exploring urge could move itself, an enframing of the world as an unknown still to be unveiled

Ex Carta contains first editions of the complete sequence of the celebrated 

 by Jules Verne (1828–1905), published in richly gilt polychrome cartonnage bindings. This monumental series comprises sixty-five works in total, issued in forty-seven volumes. It defined Verne’s reputation as the master of scientific romance and adventure, and remains one of the most ambitious publishing projects of nineteenth-century France.