Books

Hafniae & Lipsiae [Copenhagen & Leipzig]: Jacob Preuss, 1741. First edition. With four engraved plates (one folding), engraved title page, all bound at front. Head and tail pieces. 380 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Original rose boards, unpressed and pages untrimmed. Extremities rubbed and scuffed, some dampstaining to bottom corner. With bookplates of historian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890) and Henrik G. Petersen (ca. 1899). Very good copy. First edition. With four engraved plates (one folding), engraved title page, all bound at front. Head and tail pieces. 380 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Biting satire of contemporary Denmark in the mode of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Iter Subterraneum or Underground of Nicolas or Niels Klim is a remarkable hollow-earth utopia composed by Ludvig Holberg. In 1665, Klim falls down a hole and finds himself in the land of Potu, where the “inhabitants show a societal pattern diametrically opposed to that of the contemporary stereotype: women are the…

Set in the year 1665, the story is narrated by Niels Klim, who returns to his hometown of Bergen after graduating from the University of Copenhagen. During a mountain climb with friends, he falls into a pit and, after fifteen minutes, emerges in the hollow interior of the Earth. This space is a miniature cosmos with planets orbiting a small sun. After drifting for a while, he lands on a planet called Nazar, in the kingdom of Potu (an anagram of "utopia"), where he encounters intelligent tree-like beings. Holberg's work combines satire with a fantastic voyage and embodies the spirit of the eighteenth century. Aside from its Latin language and passages of verse and prose adapted from classical authors, this novel is entirely modern in spirit. Its depiction of travel to exotic lands is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), but with more wit and humor. Holberg's idea of a hollow Earth containing other habitable lands foreshadows Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth."

First edition can be identified by its original Latin text and its unique use of folding plates.