Wells, French and British

 


A pendant to yesterday's post: here is the cover to the first French edition (Les Premiers Hommes dans la Lune, 1901) of H G Wells's First Men in the Moon: a ‘cartonnage doré et coloré’, with a Selenite alien looking out at us. Illustrations for this edition were by Martin van Maële, a French illustrator who worked for the Parisian publisher Felix Juven (van Maële also illustrated Juven's French translations of the Sherlock Holmes stories) but was best known, then as now, for a wide range of pornographic images of sexual congress, involving many naked, pneumatic women, old men, clergymen and sometimes children (I do not recommend you googling his oeuvre from a work computer). The title page of Juven's edition attributes the work to ‘H-G Wells’, perhaps in the belief that English Herbert George was actually Henri-Georges, in the French style.


But the cover is richer, with its gilded illustration and crimson binding, than the more understated English first edition cover, published by George Newnes in London earlier that year.


Gilded, and with an rather florid font for the title, but with a generic design rather than a specific illustration on the cover. In general Wells's UK publishers chose functional, even utility cover designs for his books.



Henri-Georges had rather more flair than Herbert Georges, it seems.



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