2, 1901, Verne wrote to Hetzel fils (Louis-Jules Hetzel), “I am sending you today by train, registered, a manuscript [first part of the Kip Brothers]. Please confirm by telegram your receipt of it so as to put my mind at ease.” And on October 26, 1901, he wrote, “The second part of the Kip Brothers will leave tomorrow, Monday. You will receive it on Tuesday, and I ask you to please let me know of its safe arrival by telegram.”11 It does appear—and other letters of the same time period confirm this assumption—that Verne selected this novel to be published the following year from among several manuscripts he had already completed. From the mid-1880s onward, Verne was ahead of schedule with his writing and produced more than the minimum of two volumes12 per year required by his contract with Hetzel.13 In 1900 and 1901 Verne had a sizable stock of manuscripts from which he could draw to supply Hetzel with his two volumes for 1902.14
Hetzel received the first volume of The Kip Brothers in September 1901.15 Most of the month of September was devoted to typesetting the novel. Verne received the proofs on September 28, and on October 7 Verne wrote to Hetzel, saying: “I am returning the text of the Kip Brothers to you little by little as I correct it.”16 These corrections and copyediting revisions were done directly on the printed proofs. Between the manuscript and the final printed versions, long sentences were divided into shorter sentences, the rhythm of the action became more active, and the descriptions gained in clarity. The modifications included word rearrangements in sentences and changes of wording that did not change the meaning of the text but made it more readable and improved the style.
After receiving the corrected proofs during the last months of 1901, Hetzel began to print the novel. As mentioned, the “pre-original” edition of The Kip Brothers was first published in serial format in the Magasin d’Education et de Récréation from January to December 1902, and it was illustrated with drawings by George Roux.17
The second printing was in book form and is called the “original” edition, two small in-octodecimo volumes, with few illustrations. The first volume was ready July 21, 1902, and the second was put on the market November 10, 1902.
The third printing was the famous octavo volume with full illustrations, often referred to as “the Hetzel edition” or (wrongly) as “the Original Edition.” This edition was available on November 20, 1902, in three versions: paperbound, “demi-chagrin” (half leather), and deluxe fabric with red-and-gold covers.
Sales of The Kip Brothers, it seems, were generally disappointing. Like other novels published late in Verne’s career, it had difficulty selling out its initial print run of 4,000.18
ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOS
During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, as photography became increasingly popular, many publishers (including Hetzel) began to use photographs, photolithography, and two-toned lithography to illustrate their books. These new technologies gradually replaced the older woodcut-engraving methods because they were cheaper, faster, and less labor intensive.
To see a kind of historical “snapshot” of this technological (r)evolution in the publishing industry, one need only to examine some of Verne’s later Voyages extraordinaires from 1890 to 1905 to see a fascinating mixture of old-fashioned woodcuts, halftone illustrations (some in color), and photographs.
The illustrated edition of Verne’s The Kip Brothers constitutes an excellent example of this trend. One discovers therein four different types of illustrations:
1. Forty drawings by George Roux, engraved by Froment.19 Twelve of the drawings, which appeared as black-and-white illustrations in the Magasin, were reproduced in color in the in-octavo edition (described on the title page as “grandes chromotypographies,” full-page chromotypographs—a kind of early color print). The frontispiece and the title page illustration are also new in the in-octavo edition.
2. A dozen illustrations “borrowed” from other books. Seven, for example, were recycled from the nonfiction works of Jules Verne himself—his three-volume Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs (History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators)—and one was taken from a book called Voyage of the Griffin (identified as “adapted by P.-J. Stahl” [a pseudonym of Hetzel] and, one assumes, published by him). But three other illustrations in The Kip Brothers were borrowed (should we say copied or stolen?) from a British four-volume work of geography,20 and one—a mosaic of three woodcuts depicting Dunedin, New Zealand, along with a local volcano crater and a geyser—is not credited (although it too probably came from the same British work).
3. Six reprinted photographs.21 The source for two of these photographs was a German book published in 1902, the same year that The Kip Brothers itself was published. It is somewhat ironic that though the text of The Kip Brothers dated from years before, such was certainly not the case for some of the photographs that Hetzel chose to illustrate the book—they were often last-minute selections.
4. Two maps22 of the areas visited in the novel—New Zealand and the Bismarck Archipelago—engraved by a certain “E. Morieu.” The first one was recycled from Verne’s Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century (volume 2 of his History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators).
SOURCES AND INFLUENCES
As a general rule, all of Verne’s novels are derived from two types of sources: one for the science (broadly defined to include not only physics, chemistry, and biology but also geography) and one for the fiction.
Verne’s sources included those many nineteenth-century dictionaries and atlases of which he made constant use, such as Privat-Deschanel and Focillon’s Dictionnaire général des sciences théoriques et appliquées23 and Reclus’s Nouvelle géographie universelle.24 He also consulted and quoted from a variety of reference books written in layman’s language with the goal of teaching the natural sciences to the general reader—such as Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science25 or Flammarion’s L’Astronomie populaire.26 Verne was also very well read in the published travelogues and histories of exploration of his time, such as Arago’s Voyage autour du monde,27 Agassiz’s Voyage au Brésil,28 Chaffanjon’s L’Orénoque et le Caura,29 and Charton’s Voyageurs anciens et modernes,30 along with similar accounts published in magazines like Le Journal des voyages and Le Tour du monde. Finally, Verne was also a voracious reader of scientific journals and the bulletins of scientific societies such as Malte-Brun’s Nouvelles annales des voyages, de la géographie, de l’histoire et de l’archéologie and the Comptes-rendus des scéances de l’Académie des Sciences, from which he often gleaned ideas for his novels.31
So what were Verne’s principal scientific sources for The Kip Brothers? Clearly, an important one was the author’s own multivolume history of world exploration, Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs (History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators, 1878–1880), from which, as mentioned above, a number of illustrations were reprinted. And three other works that helped to provide much of the geographical and historical documentation for Verne’s descriptions of the South Seas islands in this novel were Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde,32 Dumont d’Urville’s Voyage au pôle sud et dans l’Océanie,33 and Duperrey’s Voyage autour du monde.34
As for the discussions of retinas and ophthalmology presented in the surprise ending of the novel, Verne scholar Marcel Moré and family biographer Jean Jules-Verne have both indicated that Verne probably consulted the L’Encyclopédie française d’ophtalmologie by Lagrange and Valude35 for details about such “optograms” (retina-photos). But these claims seem rather dubious since this nine-volume encyclopedia appears to have been first published in 1903, one year after Verne’s The Kip Brothers came into print and five years after the story was written. It seems more likely
