Jules Verne Centennial Engravings

The Smithsonian Museum, to honor the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s passing, has set up a website and filled it with high resolution scans of Verne’s own engravings. The engravings are fantastical and awe-inspiring, often featuring yet-to-be-made inventions, aeronautical craft, spaceships, and wild animals. The engravings convey the same sense of adventure you get when reading a Verne novel.

Coincidentally, I just started reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea about a month ago. I needed to pick it up partially because it’s been sitting on my shelf for so long, but also because the world around can be very mundane and depressing. There is a sense of excitement and exploration that is imbued into every page of a Verne novel; it’s suddenly okay to dream up fantastic ideas within these pages. Too often we get caught up in all the messiness around us; the wars, the famine, the politics. It’s easy to forget to dream about the near limitless possibilities around us. It continues to be a pleasure to read Verne.

If you have never read any of Jules Verne’s novels, you are in luck. Many (if not all) of his books fall in the public domain and are freely available online. He was a prolific writer, so I would suggest either simply Googleing the title you want, or by searching through his Wikipedia Page. Or, if audiobooks are more your thing, Librivox has got a bunch of them available for download.

Link to the engraving gallery