[1891] A Plunge into Space

Description

Early Edition, Illustrated, Publishers' Original Binding

The second edition, with a preface by Jules Verne.

This issue without preliminary leaves, the first few leaves being the half-title, frontispiece, title page, contents leaf, dedication to Jules Verne, and Verne's 'To My English Readers'. No date to the title page. Six leaves of adverts to the rear, the first leaf of which had 30 titles, ending with Gaskell's 'Mary Barton'. The first gathering is 7 leaves, or 8 including the frontispiece, where as gathering Q is 7, including the adverts.

'A Plunge into Space' is a utopian sci-fi novel, in which humans travel to Mars and find a utopia which is so perfect that it's boring.

The themes of this novel later re-appeared ten years later in H. G. Wells' 'The First Men in the Moon'; Cromie later accused Wells of plagiarizing 'A Plunge into Space'.

Modern scholars believe that Jules Verne's preface to this work was actually written by someone else. 

Illustrated with a frontispiece, and a vignette title page.

By the Irish author Robert Cromie.

Six pages of adverts to the rear. 

Prize label to the front paste down, presenting the work to William Bartlett in 1891, from Spring Grove School. Bartlett's ink inscription to the recto of the front endpaper.