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

Ex Carta

Cover for 'Propeller Island'

Title page and illustrations for 'Propellor Island'

Part I of 'Propellor Island' with map of Oceania showing the route of the itinerary in the story, and illustration. 

Woodcut illustration of the characters encountering a giant crab, and a map of the Pacific Ocean with inset maps of the Hawaiian Islands

Map of the Pacific Ocean, with inset maps of the Polynesian Islands

Cover for 'Facing the Flag' and 'Clovis Dardentor'

Title page illustrations for 'Facing the Flag' and 'Clovis Dardentor'

Title page for 'Clovis Dardentor' signed by Jules Verne

Cover for 'An Antarctic Mystery (The Ice Sphinx)'

Title page and illustrations for 'An Antarctic Mystery (The Ice Sphinx)'

Map of the Southern Hemisphere encompassing Antarctica and southern Australia, New Zealand and southern South America. 

Cover for 'The Mighty Orinoco'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Mighty Orinoco'

Map of the course of the Orinoco River

Cover for 'The Will of an Eccentric'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Will of an Eccentric'

Fold-out board game for the 'Noble Game of the United States of America', a giant game of goose imagined by Jules Verne in his novel 'The Will of of an Eccentric', published in serial form in the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation

Fold-out map of the United States of America, showing state divisions and major highways

Cover for 'The Castaways of the Flag', a two-volume adventure novel by Jules Verne designed to serves as a sequel and continuation of Johann David Wyss's 'The Swiss Family Robinson (1812).

Title page for 'The Castaways of the Flag)

Map of New Switzerland, an imaginary island in the Indian Ocean where Jules Verne's sequel to 'The Swiss Family Robinson' 

Cover for 'The Village in the Treetops' and 'The Sea Serpent'

Title page and illustrations for 'The Village in the Treetops' and 'The Sea Serpent'

Map of the eastern coast of Asia, covering China, Korea, Siberia, Russia, and Japan

Map of the Congo, with parts of Cameroon and Angola

Cover for 'The Kip Brothers'

Title page for 'The Kip Brothers'

Map of New Zealand

Map of the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands

Cover for 'Master of the World' and 'A Drama in Livonia'

Title page and illustrations for 'Master of the World' and 'A Drama in Livonia'

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’. 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.

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.

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.