“Some years ago — it might have been in 1984 — I told a friend of my growing delight in Jules Verne, and how I’d so much like to own one of his books in its original format. Verne’s novels were first published in the middle of the century before the one before this one. The series was called Voyages Extraordinaires. The publisher and editor was Verne’s dear friend Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The bindings were intaglio’d with globes and alembics, elephants and balloons, harpoons and astrolabes. Though they were tooled leather, they gave the sense of dark wood, of hand-turned brass. They seemed not just of another era but of another world. To run your fingers over the cover of a Hetzel octavo was to go on an extraordinary voyage, a Braille of wonder.
I was told that if I wanted to purchase a Voyage Extraordinaire, the place to go was the Librairie Jules Verne, called l’Île Mysterieuse. I was told they specialized in the author. I was not told that they sold nothing else.”
