Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Unique Cover?

My girlfriend and I went thrifting today and came upon an old copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. It caught my eye as interesting because of the cover which featured a man and a boy on an airship, not anything nautical which is usually what you find on the cover. (It was later discovered to be the cover of "Ticket No. 9672", just with the title and book contents of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea). Upon further inspection of the book, I found it was published by M. A. Donohue & Co. and had neither a publication date nor any copyright dates. After doing some research, I discovered that the publishing company changed their name around 1880 to Donohue & Henneberry, and in 1901 changed it back to the almost identical M. A. Donohue and Company. With the original English publishing year for TTLUS being 1872 and the English Publication of Ticket No. 9672 being 1887 as well as the name change of the company in 1880 a bit of a confusing turn. Unless the artwork for the cover was drawn up ahead of time, used for a few copies (Only internet copy I could find was a digital scan copy from the UF George A. Smathers Library Database) and then scratched and saved for Ticket No. 9672 I'm at a complete loss. After all my research, I'm stumped to find the three main things I'm looking for. So I was hoping to see if anyone here might have some answers to a few questions regarding this strange copy. When exactly was it published? What is it worth (I'm not big on selling my finds, but I'd like to know if I have a ten cent run of the mill copy or a $5000 ultra rare misprint story piece)? And why does this cover share the same cover with Ticket No. 9672? Ahead of time, I'd like to thank anyone who responds, and apologize if any of my research is incorrect.

 

I got nothing.....only seeing the airship used on other publications..... leads me to wonder if yours isn't a chinese reprint where someone was unclear on the concept..

 

That's funny,someone put the cover for The Tour of the World in 80 days on a Twenty Thousand leagues Under the Sea book. Someone was drunk or just didn't care what they were doing at the publishing company ?

https://library.si.edu/donate/adopt-a-book/tour-world-eighty-days

 

So they used the illustration from a different cover? Is that what you mean, @Jarl Varska ? It obviously isn't the actual cover of the other book since it doesn't include that title.

You mention the English publication of the books, but this is an American publication and probably post-dated those by some time. I will see if I can do some research on this later, if nobody else has by then. I think that Donohue sometimes did inexpensive editions in the early 20th century. I suspect that is what this is, based on the cover and typeface. I happen to enjoy this type of old inexpensive edition. Another company that did that type of thing was Grosset & Dunlap.

[Edit: or did you mean publication in English? Sorry if I misunderstood your original intent on that.]

 

I found a few sites that give the history of M. A. Donohue & Company. The name first existed in 1901. This page from the Lucile project, compiled by the former head of the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Library, gives a chronology of names of the publishing company. The website itself is for tracing the publication history of one particular book (not the title you have).
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/donoma/donoma.htm

According to that page, the company existed under that name starting in 1901. It also says they first used the name as an imprint in 1903. Given that, your edition would not have existed before that date. So it is a later edition. The page above also says that in the early 1900s some time the company decided to deal exclusively in children's books. I'm not sure whether the edition you have was considered to be a children's version or not, so that doesn't really help to date it.

Another clue is no copyright or publication date given. That often happened with the publishers of later, less expensive editions. Or sometimes they just gave the original copyright date that might belong to a different publisher (Grosset & Dunlap did that quite often). It can be very difficult to find the exact publication date. One thing you might want to try if you have the time is to find copies of the American publication called Publishers Weekly. Some of those are available online through the Internet Archive and other sites, but many are not. The American publishers often advertised when they issued new editions. I don't know where you are located so don't know if this is feasible for you.

As to why they re-used a cover design that was originally from one of their other books I would say that perhaps it was to save expenses by not having to design a different cover on this edition. But that is just speculation. I found one with a somewhat redesigned cover, issued by the same publisher, held at the University of Florida libraries:
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00009631/00001/1j

So at some point they did pay for a redesign...
And it's actually pretty close to yours, now that I look more carefully.

It's difficult to do research on book covers on popular editions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as publishers often switched cover designs and colors of covers. I've never seen any later studies as to why publishers did that.

 

Donohue was a low cost reprint publisher. They appear to have used the same cover art on several of their reprints of titles by Jules Verne: A Tour of the World in Eighty days, The Cryptogram, Round the Moon, as well as Ticket No. 9672. It was probably just cheaper to use the same artwork.
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Se...tlyadded=all&sortby=17&cm_sp=pan-_-srp-_-pics

 

What a very cool find! Outstanding research by the community. That would be a neat sub-collection: all the different titles where they used the same artwork.