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

Ex Carta

Cover for 'Robur the Conqueror' and 'A Lottery Ticket'

Title page and illustrations for 'Robur the Conqueror'

Alternative title page for 'Robur the Conqueror' and 'A Lottery Ticket'

Map of southern Norway

Cover for 'North Against South' (or 'Texan's Revenge')

Tite page and illustrations for 'North Against South'

Map of Georgia and Northern Florida

Cover for 'Two Years' Vacation'

Title page and illustration to accompany 'The Robinsonade Cycle'

Cover for 'Inside Out' and 'The Flight to France'

Title page with illustrations for 'Inside Out' and 'The Flight to France'

Map of Germany from 'The Flight to France' tracing the route of the character De Belzingen and his companions as they travel toward and through France.

Map of the Argonne Forest from 'The Flight to France'

Cover for 'Family Without a Name'

Title page and illustration for 'Family Without a Name' 

Map showing the course of the Saint Lawrence River

Cover for 'César Cascabel'

Title page for 'César Cascabel'

Map of the Americas and title page and illustration for Part I of 'César Cascabel'

Map of Asia and Australisia from 'César Cascabel'

Cover for 'Mistress Branican'

Title page and illustrations for 'Mistress Branican'

Maps of Oceania and Australia from novel 'Mistress Branincan'

Cover for 'Claudius Bombarnac' and 'The Carpathian Castle'

Title page and illustration for 'Claudius Bombarnac'

Illustrations for 'Claudius Bombarnac' and 'The Carpathian Castle'

Map of the Great Trans-Asiatic Route, from 'Claudius Bombarnac' and an illustration showing the character in Tblisi, Georgia. 

Cover for 'P'tit Bonhomme', also known as 'Foundling Mick'

Title page and illustration for 'Foundling Mick'

Cover for 'Captain Antifer'

Title page and illustration for 'Captain Antifer'

Map of Spitzbergen, from 'Captain Antifer'

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.