£1,250
FIRST ENGLISH EDITION, DELUXE ISSUE, 8vo, pp. viii, 408 + folding plan and 59 plates. Original green decorated cloth, edges gilt, green-printed endpapers. Three plates detached, these consequently a little soiled and nicked to edges. Cloth a little rubbed to extremities.
The scarce first English edition of this late Verne adventure novel. The will of the title refers not to mental fortitude but a last will and testament; in the book an eccentric American has left his sixty million dollar fortune to the winner of an elaborate game, based on the Game of the Goose but played out across the continental United States. The folding plate depicts the game board, with each space depicting a different state or area. Verne took his information on the geography from the recently published Baedeker guide to the USA.
This is the deluxe variant, with 59 plates, gilt edges and printed endpapers, it was also issued in the same year in a slightly plainer binding with 19 illustrations, in which form it was reissued two years later as a 'cheap edition'. By this point in Verne's career interest in the Anglophone world was waning and the print run of this version was relatively small; the eight or nine novels he wrote subsequently mostly went unpublished in English until long after his death. It also has never been published in the USA despite the setting of the action. Library Hub records 5 copies, at BL, NLS, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, but does not differentiate between variants.
