VOIAGE DU MONDE DE DESCARTES. Paris: Chez la Veuve de Simon Be'nard, ruë saint Jacques, vis-à-vis le College de Loüis le Grand, 1690. 12mo, pp. [1-18] [1-10] 11-437 [438: errata] [439-440: blank], one inserted folded double plate, 18 woodcut illustrations in the text, contemporary mottled calf, brown morocco title piece affixed to spine panel, all edges stained red. First edition. A popular work reprinted on at least four occasions in Europe by 1739 and translated into English as A VOYAGE TO THE WORLD OF CARTESIUS (1692). "An ingenious satire on Descartes' system of vortices put into the form of a cosmic voyage through the Cartesian universe." - Gibson and Patrick, "Utopias and Dystopias, 1500-1750" in Gibson, St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography (1961) 662. "One of the earliest interplanetaries of all, based on the theories of Descartes; Spirit voyages to the Moon, peopled by those passed on from their lives on Earth, and then to a cosmos operated on Cartesian principles. Most of the latter part of the book is in the form of an illustrated dissertation." - Locke, Voyages in Space 006. "... the aim of the work is to spread the information about the principal philosophical debates of the time ... Nonetheless, the use of the narrative expedient of the voyage to the Moon is an interesting device which places Daniel in the sixteenth-century tradition of Wilkins, Godwin and Cyrano (to whom specific reference is made)." - Fortunati and Trousson (editors), Dictionary of Literary Utopias, pp. 673-4. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time, pp. 20-1. Clute and Nicholls (eds), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), p. 298. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 50 (citing a later 1694 British edition). Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 13 (describing the 1692 British edition). Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 255 (recording 5 copies of this edition). Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon, pp. 202-3. Bleiler (1978), p. 56 (listing the 1692 British edition). Calf scuffed at extremities, two tiny worm holes in spine panel, professionally re-cased with new endpapers, owner's name clipped from top edge of front fly leaf, tiny marginal chip from lower corner of leaf H6, larger marginal chip from lower corner of leaf I2 (neither touching text), contemporary owner's name partially erased from recto of title leaf, small ink stain to same, still a remarkably clean copy of this classic work in an attractive contemporary binding. There are two extra copies of the folding plate inserted in this copy. Provenance: Bookplate of space travel historian Frederick I. Ordway, III, affixed to the front paste-down. (#66858).
Price: $2,250.00
No statement of printing.