We had conquered one mystery, but a bigger dragon rose out of this solution. Sebisch's notes matched Tycho's copies here and there; they were obviously from the same family, but just as clearly they seemed to stem from a Tychonic copy we had not identified. Between the two of us, we had canvassed the major universities and libraries well enough to know that the chances of finding a fourth copy from Tycho were pretty low—and yet we found it within six weeks!
My earlier search of the auction records had left a couple of loose ends, one old and one new. First, the new one: Several recently auctioned copies had been knocked down* to a buyer named Umiastowski, whose English address was unknown to me. My Polish colleagues identified him as the colonel who, at the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, had gone on the radio to urge every able-bodied man to the front, and had thereby created the most monumental traffic jam yet known in Warsaw. The old loose end was that in 1912 and 1913 Christie's in London had auctioned first editions, but I had been able to trace only one of them. So I asked Christie's if I could look at their old records in search of clues to help identify the unlocated book.
In the workroom at Christie's I soon found the answer to the older problem. The 1912 and 1913 copies were one and the same. For the first sale, the description "with marginal notes and annotations" had been deemed inadequate by the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch (who had won the De revolutionibus with a bid of twenty-two pounds), so the book was returned because the auction catalog hadn't indicated that folios 38 and 39 were in an old calligraphic facsimile, and not the original printed leaves. Christie's corrected the description by specifically mentioning that two leaves were supplied in manuscript, and put it on the block once more, four months later. Quaritch again purchased it, but this time for much less. My subsequent researches revealed that Quaritches still had the book after World War I, and in 1925 they were offering it for twenty-five pounds. Six years later, despite the stock market crash, the London firm of Henry Sotheran had it, priced at seventy-five pounds.*
Valentin Sebisch's marginal annotations in De revolutionibus (left), neatlycopied from the original set made by Paul Wittich (right). Both copies are now in the Wroclaw University library.
As I was zeroing in on the identification of the ghost copy, the telephone rang. A Christie's staff member held a brief conversation, hung up, and turned to a colleague to ask, "Do you know anyone named Umi-astowski?"
His coworker merely shrugged, but I leapt to attention. When I discovered that Umiastowski was in the waiting room, since the person he wanted to see wasn't in yet, I rushed downstairs and quickly guessed who was the expatriate Polish colonel. I introduced myself and launched into a conversation about his famous countryman. Umiastowski warmed to the subject and expansively claimed to have four copies of Copernicus' book. Before the conversation was over, I had got his address and an invitation to come and see his books in Dulwich in the near future.
By mid-December 1977 I had made the arrangements to visit the eighty-six-year-old colonel. Roman Umiastowski began by showing me his first edition—a "complete" copy, he proudly announced. I was quite puzzled and not a little suspicious since the book had been auctioned rather cheaply a few years earlier as imperfect, lacking eight leaves. As I paged through it, I was thrilled to recognize that its marginalia matched an extensive set I had seen in Toronto. I was slowly coming to realize that major annotations seldom come singly; before my eyes a new family of annotations was emerging.
I turned another page and was stopped cold in my tracks. The marginal handwriting totally changed, but what arrested my attention was the fact that this second hand was Tycho's! By that time I was so familiar with his distinctive writing that I could be quite sure, yet for a moment nothing made any sense. I paged on, and eight leaves later the first handwriting reappeared. Very quickly I realized that Umiastowski had inserted eight Tychonic leaves to make his first edition complete; in fact, the leaves were not from a first edition at all but from a second.
I didn't have to look far to see the source of the eight Tychonic leaves. Stacked on the far side of the table were the folios from a broken De revolutionibus. Besides the broken Tychonic copy, there were two more second editions as well as the first. Umiastowski's great joy was to make books complete, and having bought several imperfect copies, he was in the process of disassembling one of them to make other incomplete copies complete. The problem was, Umiastowski was cutting up what was obviously the most important second edition in private hands in order to repair the others. It was theater of the absurd. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
As diplomatically as I could, I explained the importance of the annotations to the colonel. Umiastowski looked very sad and allowed that he had just brought his "complete" copy back from the bindery the previous week. Before I left, he had agreed to reassemble the Tychonic copy and to allow me to return to make a microfilm of it. I could hardly wait to get back to Cambridge to recount my adventure to Bob Westman. We were both almost incredulous at the idea that I had so promptly found the original notes from which Sebisch had copied. By January I had made my microfilm, and we began to pore over the annotations. But Bob was increasingly troubled, and he recalled his original doubts about the handwriting.
"There's something wrong," he asserted. "Why would Tycho Brahe, who was so industriously building instruments on his island of Hven, and so busy making observations, take time to annotate four separate copies of De revolutionibus? At the very least he must have used an amanuensis."
I objected, saying that if the copies were all alike, of course a secretary could have copied the notes, but these copies were each different. And you don't tell your secretary to write in the margin, "I don't understand this theorem." Such a note had to be written by the astronomer himself. But I agreed with Bob that we had to check the handwriting to make sure it really was Tycho's. We knew that the great bulk of Tychonic manuscripts were in the manuscript collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. I remembered I had some Vienna photocopies back in my office in the States, but we were in a hurry. Then I recalled that sometime in the nineteenth century one of the Czech scholars had produced a facsimile of a trigonometry manuscript in Tycho's hand. The next day, I found it in the Cambridge University Library. Titled Triangulorum planorum et sphaericorum praxis, it was printed in Prague in 1886.
The trigonometric manual turned out to be quite problematic. The agreement between the handwriting in the old Prague facsimile and in the annotated copies of De revolutionibus was not very convincing and left a cloud of ambiguity over the whole project. Bob was convinced there was something fishy about the Prague document, and pretty soon he retrieved more information about it in the multivolume Tychonis Brahe Opera Om-nia, the modern edition prepared early in the twentieth century by the astronomical historian J. L. E. Dreyer. Dreyer was highly critical of the claims made for the Prague trigonometry manual. It couldn't be in Tycho's hand, he declared; Tycho never made a two-stroke capital M like those in the Triangulorum planorum and also, disconcertingly, like those in the annotations in our four "Tycho Brahe" Copernicus volumes.
Had we been deceiving ourselves for four years? Was it possible that Tycho wasn't, after all, the author of those interesting planetary diagrams in the Vatican?
I put in a phone call to my office in the United States, requesting that my photocopies of some of the Viennese Tycho materials be rushed to me at once. About a week later the sheets arrived. Bob and I eagerly compared them with the microfilms of the Copernican annotations. It did not take long to realize that we were in trouble. The handwritings did not match at all.
The moment of truth had arrived. We had been chasing the wrong scent. Tycho Brahe could not possibly have annotated those four copies of De revolutionibus. As Kepler said when one of his ideas collapsed, "The hypothesis has gone up in smoke."
* But if you live in Cape Town, the nearest first edition is about 6,000 miles north, in Naples. From Buenos Aires it is about the same distance to Gu
adalajara, Mexico. From Sydney the nearest first edition is in Manila, nearly 5,000 miles north. From Delhi it is almost an equidistant 4,000 miles to first editions in Moscow, Manila, or Hiroshima.
* Facsimile editions of the 1543 first edition were published in 1928 (Paris), 1943 (Amsterdam and Turin), 1960 (Leipzig), and 1966 (Brussels), and a CD Rom in 1999 (Los Altos). A facsimile was also made of the 1566 second edition in 1972 (Prague).
† One of my most distinct memories of this trip is the fact that Liege was the only place where I have ever found 165 volts in the electric lines. I traveled with photoflood bulbs for the standard European 220 volts, so I was temporarily stymied, but presently the astfonomers produced a transformer and I was in business.
* Quite by chance I discovered in which university town the "German nation" of the St. Andrews copy was actually located. While in Padua, as I was looking at an exhibition marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo's professorship there (in 1592), I noticed in a display case the same roster of names in one of the exhibited books; a further investigation disclosed that they were all among the foreign students at Padua in the early 1600s. There are a dozen first editions in Paris, and a baker's dozen of the second.
* In 2001 Cambridge University Library acquired the collection of letters for £6.37 million.
* Over lunch the Macclesfields explained that Shirburn was one of only three or four buildings in England that still retained a working moat on all four sides, and that cinema companies frequently asked to rent the castle. But Lord and Lady Macclesfield considered this to be too much of a nuisance since the movie moguls would wish to pull down the anachronistic rain gutters. Lady Macclesfield also remarked that they had occasionally thought about opening the casde to the public on Sunday afternoons, for besides the paintings it included many historical curiosities such as Queen Elizabeth I's riding gloves. Unfortunately, they noted, the flow pattern was not conducive to large groups, so nothing ever came of that. As far as I know, Miriam is the only person in history of science circles who has had the tour.
* When the auctioneer taps his or her hammer to indicate that the bidding is over, the item is said to have been knocked down.
* The copy could well have accidentally come incomplete from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and rather than return it, an original owner may have made the manuscript facsimile of the missing signature. The fact that this copy was imperfect accounts for its later wandering. It was much less expensive than a perfect copy and thus affordable by an English mathematics professor who taught for over a decade at Iowa State Univetsity. Apparently, he sold it around 1937 when he returned to England, and it was bought by Yale University. Eventually, a Yale benefactor offered to exchange this one for a perfect copy (the most important first edition in America, described in the previous chapter), and in 1971 this benefactor gave the imperfect copy to Stanford University. When Stanford subsequently acquired a perfect copy, I realized that this one might be released as a duplicate. I knew that the staff in charge of special collections at San Diego State University greatly coveted a copy, but the library could not afford the astronomical price to which a perfect copy had ascended, so I suggested that they negotiate with the Stanford library. In 1991 the library at San Diego State University purchased the imperfect copy as its millionth book acquisition.
Chapter 7
THE WITTICH CONNECTION
ON SATURDAY, 29 October 1580, the noble-born, imperious, and eccentric Tycho Brahe inscribed the title page of one of the most lavish and spectacular books printed in the sixteenth century (plate 6). Peter Apian's Astronomicum Caesareum was truly astronomy for an emperor's eyes. Dedicated to Charles V of Spain, it had won for its author, an astronomy professor at the university in Ingolstadt, the right to appoint poets laureate and to pronounce legitimate children born out of wedlock. A giant folio with brightly hand-colored pages, not only was it a tour de force of scientific printing, but its numerous sets of volvelles—layers of rotating paper disks—could be used to calculate planetary positions and configurations. Tycho later admitted it had cost him twenty florins, which by today's currency would be roughly $4,000.*
The inscribed Astronomicum Caesareum was a princely gift for a gifted visitor, one Paul Wittich, a peripatetic mathematical astronomer from central Europe. Wittich had been on Tycho's island fiefdom of Hven for about six weeks. He had admired Tycho's quadrant and sextant, had examined the clever scales on the instruments that allowed Tycho to read the angle to a minute of arc, and had heard about Tycho's plans to build a new and larger quadrant, to be affixed to a main inner wall of the Uraniborg castle. Wittich had brought along some ingenious mathematical tricks for converting stellar coordinates from one system to another, much admired by Tycho, and he had some stimulating ideas about the technical details of planetary cosmology. Clearly, Tycho greatly appreciated his visit and hoped that Wittich would return. The big book was part of the strategy. "To Paul Wittich of Wratislavia, friend and fellow lover of mathematics," Tycho boldly wrote in Latin.
I pondered the relationship between the well-known Brahe and the somewhat shadowy Wittich as I drove from Cambridge to Oxford one morning in late January 1978.1 was scheduled to give the astronomy colloquium on my latest Copernican research. The Tychonic bubble had burst a few days earlier, and I was still trying to reassemble the pieces. Wittich seemed part of the puzzle. I had found a fascinating set of annotations in a second-edition De revolutionibus in Wroclaw when Jerzy Dobrzycki and I were there in 1974; they included marginalia copied from both the annotated Liege volume and from Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin. There were some mathematical problems that used 52° for the latitude, close to that of Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse's observatory in Kassel. Today Hesse, lying in west-central Germany, is the eighth largest of the sixteen German states, but Wilhelm's powerful father, Philip the Magnanimous, had divided his territory among his four sons, and Count Wilhelm ruled only the northernmost principality, Hesse-Kassel. Wilhelm owes his lasting fame to his research in astronomy, and his observatory was second only to Tycho's. The rolls of astronomers there included Paul Wittich, who seemed an obvious candidate to be the annotator of the Wroclaw book, but my attempts to locate a sample of his handwriting had failed. Still, in my mind's eye, I had assigned the book to Wittich.
I had found two more samples of what I thought to be the "Tychonic" hand besides those in the quartet of Copernicus books. One was in a rare copy of Tycho's book on the new star of 1572, which I had taken as Tycho's working notes. The other was in that splendid presentation copy of the Apian Astronomicum Caesareum, now preserved at the University of Chicago Library. I supposed that Tycho had made a few marginal notes before magnanimously handing over the inscribed volume to Wittich. Somehow the simple logic that Wittich himself wrote in the book after he got it eluded me on the drive to Oxford.
Tycho Brahe, from Albert Curtz's Historia coelestis (Augsburg, 1666).
My musings turned to two sets of annotations derived from the four pseudo-Tycho De revolutionibus copies, which I had seen in the summer of 1975. Both had been made by Scots working on the Continent and brought back to their homeland. Duncan Liddel of Aberdeen taught some years in Rostock, and in 1587 he paid a week's visit to Tycho's Uraniborg castle. John Craig of Edinburgh had been dean at Frankfurt an der Oder for several years but later returned home and became personal physician to James VI (later to become James I of England). The king had paid a state visit to Uraniborg in 1590, and quite possibly Craig was part of the retinue. Craig's books passed to the king's secretary, who eventually donated them to the Edinburgh University Library.
By now I was in the outskirts of Oxford, and, still puzzled, I forgot about Tycho, Wittich, and the Scots, and concentrated on the traffic. I broke the news to my Oxford audience that Tycho was not, after all, the draftsman of the wonderful diagrams in the Vatican Copernicus.
The next afternoon, as I drove back to Cambridge, all at once I remembered an essential clue. Both Liddel and Craig had been tutored by
the mysterious Paul Wittich. And something else clicked. In the Liege copy, the one whose annotations Bob Westman had first noticed, there was a marginal note in the first person: "the mean motion most exquisitely determined by me." Craig's copy in Edinburgh read somewhat differently. It said something about "Witt," which I had taken as an abbreviation for Wittenberg. But what if instead it stood for Wittich? Did the note say that Wittich himself had determined "the mean motion most exquisitely"? I could scarcely wait to examine the microfilms, but it was hard to drive much faster on the winding route from Oxford.
As soon as I got back to Cambridge, I confirmed the reading in Craig's copy. How could I have been so dense not to have noticed it before? I telephoned Bob Westman. "I know who annotated the Vatican copy. It was Paul Wittich." Bob was skeptical but soon came around to the new view. Our task was then clear: to find out everything possible about the elusive Paul Wittich. To begin with, Wittich was born in Wratislavia— today Wroclaw, sometimes Breslau. Changing the attribution from Brahe to Wittich unexpectedly cleared up one puzzle, explaining in a stroke why Copenhagen and Uraniborg weren't in the geographic table in Ottoboniana 1902, and why Wratislavia was.
A rich mine of Wittichian information existed in the Tycho Brahe Opera omnia. Its extensive index enabled us to find that Tycho had frequently mentioned Wittich in his letters. We also discovered, quite critically, that while Wittich had visited Uraniborg, a comet had appeared, and Wittich had recorded his observations in Tycho's logbook. Some years later, after Wittich had died, a countryman visited Tycho (who by then had moved to Prague), and he wrote into the logbook that he recognized Wittich's writing on the page of comet observations. We promptly wrote to Copenhagen for color photographs of those pages of the logbook, and the Royal Library responded with admirable efficiency. If any doubt remained, it was totally dispelled by this new evidence. The handwritings matched beyond a shadow of doubt.
The Book Nobody Read Page 11