On world literature’s frontier : Jules Verne and the portable printing press

• Main Author: Riordan, Kevin
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English; Jules Verne; Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155492
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Jules Verne read a lot of newspapers. In an 1895 interview he claimed to subscribe to twenty different periodicals (Belloc 1985). In another interview, he detailed his daily routine in his study: "I come here every day after lunch and immediately set to work to read through fifteen different papers, always the same fifteen … I also read and re-read, for I am a most careful reader, the collection known as ‘Le Tour du Monde,’ which is a series of stories of travel." (Sherard 1894) In describing his writing, Verne insists on the central role of reading; the author of Le Tour du monde reads “Le Tour du Monde” every day. As Timothy Unwin suggests, Verne’s reading-and-writing process had a distinctive circularity: ideas, characters, and stories came into his library from the world and then headed out, transformed (2005, 67).