BEAUMONT, Charles Le Vainqueurs du paganisme.

Christian Martyrs in Hot-Air Balloon Binding

BEAUMONT, Charles Le Vainqueurs du paganisme. Limoges: Barbou Freres . [s.a. but likely 1863.]

12mo. Publisher’s yellow cartonnage decorated in gilt to a floral design, upper board with central panel showing chromolithographic ballooning scene ( see below ), printed spine labels; pp. 119, [1 (blank)], with half-title; lithographic frontispiece showing early Christians battling lions; a few small losses to boards, spine ends and corners bumped; sporadic light spotting (heavier to title); a very good copy in a handsome binding.

Rare work on early Christian martyrs published as part of a Limoges-printed series of moral religious works for children, this copy in a handsome cartonnage binding evidently showing the first hot-air balloon ascent from London.

The series was published with the approval of the Bishop of Limoge, this work containing the lives of Clement of Rome, St Ignatius of Antioch (with much information about his letters), St Polycarp of Smyrna, St Justin Martyr, St Athenagoras of Athens, Origen of Alexandria, and St Cyprian.

This copy is handsomely bound in contemporary cartonnage , with a central scene to the upper board depicting three spectators – two women and a man – standing before a hot-air balloon, with tents filled with onlookers in the background. The eagle adorning the hot-air balloon likely indicates that this binding was produced in the immediate aftermath of the flight of L’Aigle ( The Eagle ), the enormous hot-air balloon created by Eugène Godard which achieved the first hot-air balloon ascent from London on 24 July 1864. Launched from Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, the balloon landed in Greenwich, and a second launch was completed eight days later, landing in Walthamstow. Godard flew alongside the Telegraph journalist J.W. Prowse and British Intelligence officer Fred Burnaby, who would later cross the Channel in a gas balloon.

‘The safety of this balloon was suspect, and the owner, Monsieur Eugene Godard, had been refused permission by the French government to make ascents with it in France. Godard kept quiet about this aspect and managed to arrange a well publicised ascent from the Cremorne Gardens […] The balloon was enormous, 500,000 cubic feet in size, the hot air being produced in a great straw burning furnace which stood in the centre of the wooden car. There was considerable excitement about the ascent, especially as rumours about the safety of the contraption were circulating among the onlookers, and it seemed that the aeronauts ran the risk of being roasted as well as that of breaking their necks’ (Cullingham).

OCLC finds only a handful of copies of any edition in continental Europe; no copies traced in the US and only one in the UK, at the British Library ( 1857 ).

Bibliographie de la France (1863) 6395. See Cullingham, ‘Burnaby the Great’, in Windlesora 4 (1985).

SKU: 2126036