First edition printed in small numbers of this offprint from the Annales de chimie et de physique.
Illustrated with 5 folding plates at rear. As issued in its rare original beige paper covers with some tears to the corners and spine.
An extremely rare copy of Ampère's first dissertation on electrodynamics, presenting his first reflections on the equivalence between magnets and currents.
Illustrated edition featuring 9 original full-page etchings by Eugène Decisy, along with numerous in-text color wood engravings by Serge de Solomko. One of 800 numbered copies printed on Arches wove paper.
A handsome copy.
First edition of this work considered to be Grandville's masterpiece, with illustrations in first print.
Illustrated frontispiece, 36 colored illustrations and 146 in-text woodcuts in black.
Contemporary binding in blue half glazed calf, sunned spine with gilt arabesques, small holes at foot of spine, marbled paper boards, mould made endpapers and flyleaves, speckled edges.
This exuberant and prodigious production of Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by its contemporaries as already being mad, was rediscovered by the Surrealists.
"Published in 1844 by éditions Fournier, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book is subtitled Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, travels, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagorias, dreams, frolics, facetiae, whims, metamorphosis, zoomorphs, lithomorphosis, metempsychosis, apotheosis and other things. With its transformations, its inventions and its phantasmagoria, the work claims to reflect a changing era. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary travels of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville takes us on [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the Country of Laputa, on a parodic journey of his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideas, of his passions, inventions and worries: romanticism, mechanisation, socialism, money, serial, publicity, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc." (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.