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

Ex Carta

Cover for 'The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras'

Frontispiece wood-engraved illustration for The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras:The English at the North Pole and The Ice Desert 

Title page for The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras

Map of the north polar regions drawn for the voyage of Captain J. Hatteras. A solid line shows his route out, and a dotted line shows his return voyage. 

Cover for 'Five Weeks in a Balloon' and 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'

Title page and accompanying wood-engraved illustration for 'Five Weeks in a Balloon' and 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'

Cover for 'The Children of Captain Grant' (also known as 'In Search of the Castaways') and 'Voyage Around the World'

Wood-engraved title page illustration for 'The Children of Captain Grant' and 'Voyage Around the World'

Map showing the south eastern coast of Australia, from 'The Children of Captain Grant' 

Map showing the Middle Island and the northern part of South Island in New Zealand, from 'The Children of Captain Grant' 

Cover for 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'

Wood-engraved title page illustration for 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'

Illustration of the marine life encountered under the sea, with corresponding key

Map of the Pacific, Arctic and Antarctic Oceans marking the route

Map of the Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans marking the route

Cover for 'From the Earth to the Moon' and 'Around the Moon'

Title page for 'From the Earth to the Moon' and 'Around the Moon'

Illustration of the Observatory in Cambridge and a diagram showing the phases of the Moon

Image of the near side of the Moon and an illustration from 'From the Earth to the Moon' showing the moment when the president of the Gun-Club Impey Barbicane addresses his colleagues to reveal the ambitious project to send a manned rocket to the Moon.

A map of Florida from 'From the Earth to the Moon' and an illustration showing tensions rising between local political delegates while Barbicane selects a launch site

Cover for 'The Floating City' and 'The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa'

Wood-engraved illustration for 'The Floating City' 

Title page for 'The Floating City' 

Title page and wood-engraved illustration for  'The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa'

Map of Southern Africa covering modern day South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Lesotho. Marking the routes of explorers including Livingstone

Cover for 'The Fur Country'

Wood-engraved illustration for 'The Fur Country'

Title page for 'The Fur Country'

Map of Eastern Canada with part of the Unites States showing 'Fur Country', and an illustration showing two people examining the tracks left by wild animals.

Map of the Pacific North West and an illustration showing mountainous ice blocks advancing on the island. 

Cover for 'Around the World in 80 Days' and 'Doctor Ox'

Title page for 'Around the World in 80 Days' and Doctor Ox'

Map showing the route of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout in 'Around the World in 80 Days'

Cover for 'The Mysterious Island'

Title page and illustration for 'The Mysterious Island'

Map of Lincoln Island, also known as 'The Mysterious Island', with accompanying key

Cover for 'Michael Strogoff from Moscow to Irkutsk'

Title page and wood-engraved illustration for 'Michael Strogoff'

Portrait of Jules Verne

Map showing the route of Michael Strogoff from Moscow through Russia and Siberia

Map of the route of Michael Strogoff through Siberia to Irkutsk

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.