[MERCIER, Louis-Sebastien (1740-1814)]. Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred ... A New Edition, Revised and Corrected. Liverpool: W. Jones, 1802. 12mo in 6s. (Some light staining to title.) Modern cloth gilt. Provenance: "To [?]E. [?]Stott" (old inscription on title); "Bold, comprehensive & penetrative Ideas" (old inscription on front free endpaper); "Memoirs of" crossed out on title page and B[1] and replaced in manuscript with "Philosophic Reflections in". A contemporary inscription at the end, in the same hand, takes on some of the work's atheistic ideas: "Why do Parents tell their children that God created them - Answer - To deceive them, & to make them fancy that God instead of their selves was the immediate Cause of bringing them into this World of Trouble ..." [etc.]. First published in Paris in 1770, this Utopian novel was originally set in the year 2440, but the year was changed to 2500 for English editions. It describes the adventures of an unnamed man who falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris of the future. Robert Darnton writes that "despite its self-proclaimed character of fantasy ... [the work] demanded to be read as a serious guidebook to the future. It offered an astonishing new perspective: the future as a fait accompli and the present as a distant past. Who could resist the temptation to participate in such a thought experiment? And once engaged in it, who could fail to see that it exposed the rottenness of the society before his eyes, the Paris of the eighteenth century?" Mercier's hero notes many improvements in this futuristic Paris. Public space and the justice system have been reorganized. Its citizens' garb is comfortable and practical. Hospitals are effective and based on science. There are no monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters, pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea or tobacco and all useless and immoral previously-written literature has been destroyed.