Publisher: Lyon (with Paris privilege): Thomas Amaulry, à la Mercerie, au Mercure Galant, 1687.
Edition: Later 17th-century edition, expanded with a sixth evening’s dialogue
Binding: Contemporary mottled calf, spine with gilt floral tooling between raised bands. Rubbed, corners worn, head of spine chipped; hinges tender but holding. 12mo format.
Description: A book that carried the cosmos into the salons of Europe. In Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Fontenelle dared to imagine — and more importantly, to explain to a lay audience — a universe far larger than the scholastics had ever allowed. Written not in dense Latin but in sparkling French dialogue, this work whispered Copernicus and Galileo into the ears of noblemen and noblewomen alike, over garden walks and evening skies.
This 1687 Lyon printing, issued just a year after the Paris first, includes the celebrated sixth evening’s conversation, expanding Fontenelle’s original five dialogues. Here, readers are invited to imagine the Moon as a world, the planets as inhabited realms, and the stars as distant suns — radical notions in a century still shadowed by the Inquisition’s silencing of Galileo. Fontenelle wrapped dangerous new science in charm, wit, and courtly conversation, making the infinite not threatening, but enchanting.
Publisher’s note: Printed by Thomas Amaulry at Lyon with privilege from Paris, this edition shows how quickly Fontenelle’s work spread. Within a year, it was not just the talk of Paris but of provincial presses, carried across Europe to readers hungry for the new philosophy.
Binding: Contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments with floral devices; boards worn, spine chipped at head, joints rubbed but intact.
Interior: Crisp and clean, with wide margins; some light toning; complete with the expanded six dialogues.
Fontenelle’s Pluralité des mondes is not just a book — it is the Enlightenment in embryo: the cosmos democratized, the infinite made intimate. Owning it is to hold in one’s hands the very conversation that changed how humanity imagined its place among the stars.
Condition: Good (contemporary calf rubbed, spine chipped at head; hinges tender; text complete, clean, and wide-margined).
Annotation: Fontenelle’s groundbreaking Entretiens, Lyon 1687, expanded to six dialogues; an elegant Enlightenment classic that brought Copernican astronomy to the salons of Europe.
Item #93
Price:
$500.00
