1874 Meridiana: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa, Jules Verne

FULL TITLE: Meridiana: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa

Written by Jules Verne

Published by Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York

Language: English (translated from the original French)

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 DESCRIPTION:

Meridiana: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa, by Jules Verne, translated from the French, published by Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York, 1874. 1st authorized American edition. 

First American edition, published the same day as Shepard's pirated edition. Published in 1874 by Scribner, Armstrong & Company of New York. 1st state, with only two titles listed in the advertisement on the title verso. Embellished with 48 full-page illustrations.

Translated from the original French. French version published in 1872. Bound in contemporary blindstamped terra-cotta cloth & bright gilt front cover title. Gilt spine titling. Title-page with frontispiece accompaniment.

This South African travel adventure novel was initially published in the original French in 1872, as Aventures de Trois Russes et de Trois Anglais Dans L'Afrique Australe. Sampson Low's English edition, titled Meridiana (with the nationalities reversed in favor of the Englishmen in the subtitle, as here), was issued in November 1872 but was dated 1873. In the same month, some of these copies (printed and bound in England) were imported into the U.S. and equipped with title pages of Scribner's import house, Scribner, Welford and Armstrong (likewise dated 1873)--technically the American issue of the first English edition, and extremely scarce today. This 1874 Meridiana was then the first edition actually produced in America—therefore, the first American edition (though Henry Shepard also published an unauthorized pirate edition, titled Adventures in the Land of the Behemoth, with an altered translation and fewer illustrations, on the very same day).