Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey

A boy of enormous self-regard descends through a Siberian hole into a world of Wind Eaters, Rat Men and a city where nothing is what it announces. Ingersoll Lockwood wrote it in 1893 as a burlesque of the boys' travel book, and the joke is on the narrator throughout. It has acquired a strange modern fame; the book itself is a period comedy about bumptiousness. Thirty-seven plates by painters including Adolph von Menzel and Edvard Munch carry the moonlit houses, mountains and night skies that suit a journey through the dark.