(JOURNAL de PARIS). Journal de Paris. From Thursday,... Lot 22

(JOURNAL de PARIS). Journal de Paris. From Thursday, January 1 to Wednesday, June 30, 1784. Paris: Imprimerie de Quillau, 1784. Suite of 182 issues of 4 pages each; issue 85 of March 25, 1784 is followed by a two-page supplement publishing a letter from the inventor M. Deumier accompanied by a beautiful folding engraving of an "aerial boat" titled "Essai sur l'art de diriger à volonté la chaloupe D." Bound in contemporary vellum spotted, spine ribbed with title pieces, red edges, in good condition (departure of cracks without gravity at the upper end of the jaws).Le Journal de Paris, founded in 1777, is the first French daily newspaper. In addition to the columns on theater, new books, fairs, stock exchange, medicine, fodder, deaths, one finds in this first semester of the year 1784 numerous accounts, news and references to aeronautical experiments and discoveries: Blanchard, Montgolfier, Charles, Pilâtre de Rozier, the Gerli brothers, Saussure, Miollan and Janinet, Campmas; Blanchard's account of his aerial trip on May 23 to Rouen; that of the flight of the Marie-Antoinette hot air balloon and its preparation by Pilâtre de Rozier on June 23; the aerostatic experiment of the Academy of Dijon; and very interesting details on the organization and the reception of the public during these demonstrations, the subscriptions launched for the construction of balloons, etc. In addition, in issue 117 of Monday, April 26, under the heading "Economy", one finds an anonymous letter of 3 pages with a humorous tone, whose writer is none other than Benjamin Franklin, then Ambassador to France, proposing a solution to save on the costs of candlelight during the period from March 20 to September 20. It consisted in making Parisians get up earlier by ringing church bells at sunrise and by taxing closed shutters: a luminous prefiguration of our current system of seasonal time change.