Voyage au centre de la Terre, ou aventures diverses de Clairancy et des ses compagnons, dans le Spitzberg, au Pole-Nord, et dans

Voyage au centre de la Terre, ou aventures diverses de Clairancy et des ses compagnons, dans le Spitzberg, au Pole-Nord, et dans des pays inconnues. Traduti de l'anglais de M. Hormidas-Péath, par M. Jacques Saint-Albon.
Paris, Chez Caillot Père et Fils, 1821, 3 tomos en un volumen, 17,5 x 11 cm., holandesa piel, frontis grabado + XVI + 202 págs. = frontis + 2 h. + 208 págs. = frontis + 2 h. + 232 págs. y otras 3 láminas grabadas repartidas entre los tomos. (Muy rara primera edición completa con sus seis láminas grabadas en cobre, de este texto clásico de ciencia-ficción en la que el autor utilizó el seudónimo de Jacques Saint-Albin. Negley cita sólo un ejemplar en la Biblioteca Nacional de París. El autor fue un libre pensador, influenciado por Voltaire, prolífico en obras sobre el ocultismo, famoso por su Dictionnaire Infernal). -Classic text of utopian and science fiction. Very Rare First Edition: Negley cites only one copy (Bibliotheque Nationale France). Jacques de St. Albin was a pseudonym of Jacques A. S. Collin de Plancy, who was actually the author, not the translator, of this work. Most famous for his Dictionnaire Infernal, Collin de Plancy, a free thinker, influenced by Voltaire, was a prolific author of works on the occult. The book recounts recounts a journey through the interior of the earth into which the explorers are violently sucked by a whirlwind at the Arctic and from whence, after many adventures, they eventually exit at the Antarctic. Once inside the earth they visit four of the forty six countries of the underworld and meet a number of different peoples whose social and political customs are decribed in vivid detail. Together with Symzonia (1820) the work is one of the earliest and most complete attempts to defend the existence of a hollow earth, a theory propounded by a retired U.S. Army officer, John Cleves Symmes (1780-1829), who in 1818 had sent a circular to institutions of learning in Europe and America and who in 1822 and 1823 petitioned Congress for funds to mount an expedition to the Earth's interior-.