12mo. xii, 407pp, [1]. With an engraved folding plate. Contemporary gilt-tooled speckled sheep, contrasting red calf lettering-piece. Rubbed, some splitting to joints. Lightly spotted.

The first nineteenth-century edition of Enlightenment essayist Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle's (1657-1757) wildly successful popularisation of the Copernican system (first published in 1686), to which is appended his imaginary dialogues of illustrious and notorious figures, Dialogues des morts.