Fenton Ash [Frank Henry Atkins]

First edition of this early popular science fiction story, an adventure following two young boys as they travel to Mars and face warring kings and giant eagles.

• Fenton Ash [Frank Henry Atkins] (English).
• Illustrated by William H. C. Groome (English).
• Full-page color frontispiece with five full-page color plates.
• London, Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, Limited, 1909.
• 318 pages.
• Prize bookplate of Maggie Ritchie from the Leith School Board, dated "1912-'13," to front pastedown.
• Bound in original red pictorial cloth binding stamped in gilt, white, blue, and black designs with brown endpapers.

A Trip to Mars "may in a few years, when airship travelers have had a little more experience, cease to be a wonder adventure" noted The New York Times. The sense that the events of the story were nearly within reach was a feature of the narrative: though the setting is futuristic, Fenton Ash drew on the established African and Asian adventure story framework popular in British Victorian fiction to weave his Martian tapestry.

Predating Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1917 A Princess of Mars, A Trip to Mars touches on similar themes of Martian political upheaval that can only be solved by outsiders from Earth. This copy, with its pictorial cloth binding recalling the sensational illustrations of boys' magazines of the time, is a particularly compelling example of turn-of-the-century book design.

"And there, at a little distance from the shore, the cause of all this disturbance was plainly to be seen – an immense, egg-shaped mass many hundreds of feet in length, floating as lightly and buoyantly upon the still-heaving water as if it had been an immense football."

Everett F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years, page 23.

"Books of Wonder," New York Times, 18 December 1909.