Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
22nd October 2015
As I have written before, the 1780s saw a craze for all things ballooning. Above is a coloured engraving of an ascent made by the famous French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard in Nuremberg on 12 November 1787. As one can imagine, such ascents were exceedingly popular with the public, but there was also an element of danger involved. A broadside […]
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19th September 2014
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a fictitious Boston imprint from 1777. Here’s something in the same vein, or so I first thought: a German novel from c.1789, written by Johann Wolfgang Andreas Schöpfel (1752–1827). Inspired by the craze for balloon travel that hit Europe and America in the 1780s, it opens with a balloon flight from Versailles which ends […]
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