Product Details

Eight volumes, 12mo (6.5 x 4 in.). Engraved frontispiece portrait and numerous copper-engraved plates, including the celebrated folding illustration of the solar system. Handsomely bound in contemporary or early 19th-century half morocco over marbled boards, gilt-lettered spines with raised bands, marbled endpapers, sprinkled edges. A superb and complete eight-volume set of Fontenelle’s collected works — one of the most elegant Enlightenment editions of the 18th century, illustrated with fine engravings and printed with characteristic Parisian refinement. Fontenelle (1657–1757), philosopher, playwright, and secretary to the Académie des Sciences, was among the most graceful popularizers of science and philosophy of the early Enlightenment. His Dialogues sur la pluralité des mondes — explaining the Copernican universe in conversation between a philosopher and a marquise — brought modern astronomy to polite society, while his Histoire des oracles quietly dismantled superstition w