JEXIUM ISLAND by Madeleine Grattan

Illustrations by William Pène Du Bois

Translated from the French by Peter Grattan

Publisher: Viking Press

Copyright: 1957

Format: Hardcover with Dust Jacket

Printing: First Edition/Printing. I believe this book is now out of print. 

Summary: What an interesting find. I confess I’ve not read this book, but from my brief research it clearly holds a special place in memories from a past generation. It also sounds pretty fascinating (spoiler alert: plot reveal ahead! Skip to next paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens). The young French hero of the story, a boy named Serge, is an orphan who becomes very attached to his adoptive family sister Angèle, only for her to disappear while playing. She is believed to have drowned, but Serge follows his conviction that she was taken by a ship, leading him to an island near Newfoundland. There he discovers a grand smuggling ring in which children, with no memories of their past lives, have been forced to mine atomic Jexium. 

The original 1957 Kirkus Review reads “Here is a thrilling adventure which, for all its carefully worked out angles, becomes one of the year's best. At a certain level it is almost fantasy for the happenings seem utterly extraordinary to those of us used to the daily round. And to emphasize this, the author has given a dreamlike quality to her narrative. Yet when one takes modern scientific knowledge into account, the whole thing acquires a pattern of possibility.” 

Condition:  DJ Fair/Book Good+. It’s clear that the child who owned this book was not too concerned about its future collectibility, as there was a lot of scribbling on the boards and endpages and a couple of inside text pages. Most of it was in pencil, and some quality time with my art quality eraser cleaned it up pretty well, but a very close look will still show the erasure marks. With that disclosure…

The dust jacket is made of an inexpensive matte paper and has a good deal of wear to the corners and edges. There is a straight ½” long tear at the bottom of the jacket right along where the front flap wraps over the edge of the front cover, a 3” diagonal tear across the full width of the back flap, and wedge-shaped chip about ¾” long at the end of that tear. There’s also a mark on the front flap that looks like a piece of tape was once there, and a splotchy stain on the inside of the rear cover of the jacket which bleeds through to the rear cover as an area of slight discoloration, and a few ink or eraser-proof dark penciled scribbles on the rear flap. I’m putting a Brodart cover on the jacket after photographing to spare it from further damage.

For the book itself, the red cloth covers are in pretty good shape, with some light wear and bumping at the corners and ends of the spine. The spine is square, binding reasonably tight, hinges fully intact with no loose pages. The endpapers both front and back have lovely illustrated maps corresponding to the story. On the front pastedown there is one blue ink scribble and one area where the paper has torn over the Isle of the Dogs, I think matching that same tape mark on the dust jacket. The back endpapers which are the same art as the front are quite nice other than the faint erasure marks where I removed the pencil scribbles. Inside pages are lightly tanned/toned with age but no tears or chips and they flip easily.

Please review pictures as part of the description. I try to document the condition of my books faithfully and have truly tried to disclose every flaw on this one so there are no surprises!

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