William Carpenter. Carpenter's Folly, A Magazine Of Facts. Vol. 1, No. 1 (Baltimore, Sept. 1887) 8pp. 5.5 x 9”. disbound. Fragile and separated at spine. The only known surviving copy of the first, and probably the only, issue.
The contents include an “open letter” to a prominent Temperance crusader who had called the “flat earth” theory a “Big Blunder”, a Carpenter poem on Science and the Bible, an ad for Carpenter's Shorthand school and for his children’s book “Juvenile Jingles”.
The amazing persistence in 19th century England and America of the myth that the earth was flat rather than round, owed much to British topographer, vegetarian and spiritualist William Carpenter, who, in 1880, emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Baltimore, where he worked as a printer and later opened a school of shorthand in his home.
Renowned among flat-earth die-hards of both continents, Carpenter soon became leader of the American flat-earthers, publishing, in 1885, a widely-read pamphlet, “One Hundred Proofs That The Earth Is Not A Globe”, then attempting to produce a magazine. Robert Schadewald, who spent 20 years studying the “Flat Earth” movement, wrote in 2008 that “Carpenter’s Folly”, lasted “but a few issues and apparently no copies survive”. But he was merely speculating about whether there were any issues beyond the first, which is offered here. We could locate no listing of any issue of the imprint in any American or European institution.