Jules Verne
From the Earth to the Moon
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 30 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A gun club of artillerymen left idle by peace decide to fire a shell at the Moon, build a nine-hundred-foot cannon in Florida to do it, and three men climb inside. Written a century before Apollo, from Florida, with a splashdown in the Pacific.
Why Gustave Doré
Verne's novels were illustrated from the start. Hetzel published them as the 'Voyages Extraordinaires' with hundreds of wood engravings by Édouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville and Léon Benett — and those engravings are so bound to the books that most readers cannot picture the Nautilus without them.
Doré was in that same Paris, in those same decades, working the same medium with the same engravers' studios, and he was better at it than any of them. He never took a Verne commission. So this is not a translation into a foreign idiom — it is the original idiom, with the period's strongest hand doing the drawing.
What to look for
Engineering treated as spectacle. The book's best passages are the casting of the cannon and the crowds that come to watch, which suits an engraver whose crowd scenes are the best of the century.
