Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

Every now and then I make the rounds online and browse for beautiful books. From time to time I end up on the website of Die Andere Bibliothek. You’ll find many truly splendid, lavishly produced volumes there—made by all the rules of high bookmaking. Content-wise they only occasionally hit my taste, though. Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon by Jules Verne almost slipped past me. I’d seen the book listed among new releases at local online retailers, but only on the publisher’s website did I realize what a gorgeous edition it is. It’s been a while since I had such a must-have feeling about a book, and it really is as magnificent and beautiful as it looks in the photos. And a book by a world-famous 19th-century French author is almost always a safe bet. If you’re in the mood for a hymn of praise to a sumptuous showpiece by a triple-A author, you’re in exactly the right place.

Joam Garral is a very successful hacienda owner in Peru near the Brazilian border. His daughter Minha wants to marry a close friend of his son, but celebrate the ceremony in the city of Belém, so Garral and his wife decide to pack up everything and travel there. Here comes the typically special twist you always get in Jules Verne’s novels: the wedding party decides to make the journey on a jangada, a truly massive raft, drifting down the Amazon. It’s fitted out in style with a tidy house for the family, quarters for the servants, and even a chapel. They also take some trade goods along. So off goes a fully fledged raft train following the river’s slow current. Naturally, a tragic incident occurs along the way that puts the dear family to a hard test.

If you’ve read Verne before, you know he writes very agreeably and has a narrative style that wonderfully describes the landscape, nature, and surroundings. At times the novel reads like a travelogue about Brazil and the Amazon. He keeps sprinkling in facts, reporting on the animals, the vegetation, and the way of life of the people who live there. It’s entertaining and very relaxing to read.

“Braza,” fire-glow, is a word that appears in Spanish as early as the 12th century. From it arose the word “Brazil” for certain kinds of wood that yield a red dye (the so-called brazil or brazilwood). The name Brazil was then transferred to that vast part of South America straddled by the equator, where this wood occurs very frequently. (p. 135)

Verne’s books are also always adventure novels, and this one is no exception. His characters don’t have the psychological depth offered by some other authors, but they’re drawn in a way that suits the stories well and propels them forward. As a reader you sink into the exotic world of the Amazon through his fine descriptions while also enjoying an entertaining plot. In terms of length, Verne hits the sweet spot. The story itself isn’t extraordinary or wildly unusual, but together with the well-crafted setting it becomes a true reading pleasure. Especially in the second half—about half the book—Verne focuses more tightly on the plot and turns down the travelogue-like narration. The suspense ramps up nicely there.

I found the many elements Verne packs into the novel very convincing. There’s a diving scene with a classic steampunk-style diving suit, for instance. I especially liked a ciphered message that, of course, absolutely must be deciphered; Verne explains the cipher in detail and even offers some mathematical considerations, pondering how long a person would need to crack it. With today’s technology—and knowledge of the algorithm—the text would be solved in milliseconds. I wondered whether it would work without knowing the actual algorithm. You’d need, so to speak, an artificial intelligence to try different methods on the text—say, a neural network—and a second network to invent various ciphers and, with plentiful synthetic examples, train the first to detect them. It would be fascinating to test that on this specific text from the novel and see what deep learning can do. Naturally, this would be limited to older, simpler methods like the Caesar cipher; with AES, RSA, and the like, you won’t get far. I just don’t have the time. But the novel is certainly inspiring.

I could picture the jangada and the wild tropical landscape of the Amazon Basin perfectly. The 90 illustrations from the French original contribute a lot here. In the edition from 1901 onward, several additional color illustrations (autotypes) were included; they’re reproduced in the appendix of this book as well. Two maps were also added later and are printed on the cover. These old drawings have a wonderfully old-fashioned look and convey the book’s mood and the figures of that era. That struck me already on the website photos, and the title page alone is lovely to behold, putting you immediately in the mindset for an old, beautiful book.

I don’t think I need to say much about Jules Verne. He remains a very well-known author, lived from 1828 to 1905, and wrote numerous famous novels such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. He’s considered one of the founders of science-fiction literature. He apparently never visited the Amazon and had to rely on other authors’ travelogues for his descriptions in this novel. He does so very well, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had traveled in Brazil himself; he journeyed widely and was in America, too.

As mentioned, what delights me here is the superb design. The book comes in a slipcase open on two sides that looks unassuming at first because of the illustration. I scrolled past it the first time and only stumbled on it again a few months later. The bright green binding is printed with a map of the Amazon’s course. I already find that very appealing—and genuinely helpful for re-orienting yourself as you read. The colors are perfectly combined and chosen. The endpapers are a shade of orange that harmonizes beautifully with the green cover. The two parts of the book and the appendix are each introduced by a dark-green page, which also works very well in terms of the palette. That green is echoed again in the running heads. Details like this jump out at me immediately, and this coherent design hits a sweet spot: I love a book that’s cleanly laid out and plays with fine nuances. The paper is wonderfully supple and simply feels good in the hand—100 g/m² Munken Pure. Naturally, the book sits very well in the hand, and the high-quality sewn binding rounds it out as a true premium volume. One really has to say that Die Andere Bibliothek is playing in the big leagues here, and so far every book has fully satisfied all bibliophilic needs.

Conclusion: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon is a highly entertaining tale, especially distinguished by its landscape and nature descriptions reminiscent of a travelogue, transporting the reader into the exotic tropical world of the Amazon. The lovely conceit of sending the characters off on a gigantic raft gives the rounded story a fascinating backdrop. The successful and very high-quality production—with illustrations from the original edition, carefully chosen colors and typography, and a sturdy sewn binding—turns the book into a bibliophile experience. A book I can recommend wholeheartedly—both for its content and its design.

Book information: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne • Die Andere Bibliothek • 432 pages • ISBN 9783847704065