Mundus Alter et Idem... Authore Mercurio Britannico...

Earliest Utopia set in Terra Australis - source for Gulliver?. A collection of three influential imaginary voyages and works of utopian fiction, here first collected together: Mundus Alter et Idem by Joseph Hall (in its third edition - first published in 1605); Civitas Solis, Ida Republic Philosophic by Thomas Campanella (in its second edition - first published in 1623); and Nova Atlantis by Francis Bacon (in its second edition - first published in 1638).

Hall's work is the earliest utopia set in Terra Australis, and Campanella's City of the Sun and Bacon's New Atlantis were two of the most reprinted (often together with More's Utopia and Harrington's Oceana) of all the seventeenth century works on the ideal republic. The narrator of Mundus Alter et Idem sails in the Fantasia to the Southern Seas where he visits the strange lands of Carpulia, Viraginia, Moronia and Lavernia, countries populated by gluttons, nags, fools and thieves). The satirical depictions are thought to have provided Jonathan Swift with ideas for Gulliver's Travels and an early note to the front free endpaper reads: 'The first of these curious compositions is a pleasant invective against the characteristic vices of various nations, from which it is said Swift borrowed the idea of Gulliver's Travels'.

Third, second & second editions, 3 works in 1 volume, 12mo, xiv, 213, [23]; 106; 96pp., engraved title, five folding maps by Kaerius and an engraved plate in first work; 3 portraits added as frontispieces, 3 blanks before each work, contemporary ink-lettered vellum, a fine copy.

Alden 647/67; Brunet III, 20; Gibson (Bacon) 213; Sabin 29819.