ANOTHER INGENIOUS scheme for deducing the number of Copernicus copies printed, similar to what pollsters use, was suggested to me by a Cambridge neighbor, the MIT physicist Philip Morrison. He proposed making a list of astronomers working between, say, 1543 and 1610 who would likely have owned the book, and then see how many have been found. Such a representative sample would go something like this:
If in my searching I had matched half as owners of the book (the asterisks in the list show the owners actually identified in the Census) and we assume the others on the list owned the book, but their copies have been lost, then we would deduce a survival rate of 50 percent. It's easy to see the loopholes in this procedure. Maybe not all of them actually owned the book, or maybe owners didn't bother to inscribe their books. Kepler, for example, seemed never to have written his name in the books he owned, and his copy of De revolutionibus was identified from other evidence. So this procedure will overestimate the number printed unless some correction factor is taken into account. If one assumes the corrected survival rate to be closer to 60 percent, then the 276 copies of the first edition and 325 of the second recorded in the Census would represent print runs of 400—500 and 500—550 respectively, in reasonable concordance with the larger number of printed copies of the Principia*
If my estimate of the number printed is correct, then more than half the copies printed have survived. Unlike the ephemeral A Prognostication Euerlasting, Copernicus' De revolutionibus quickly gained a reputation as an important book, so few people would have deliberately destroyed a copy, although it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land. The radical English Protestant reformer and sometime playwright John Bale, writing in 1549, remarked that the purchasers of libraries "reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes [Johns], some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, & some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sopesellers, & some they sent oversee to the bokebynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full.... I know a merchaunt man, whych shall at thys tyme be namelesse, that boughte the contentes of two noble lybraryes for xl shyllynges pryce, a shame it is to be spoken."
The fact that De revolutionibus was a fairly expensive book may have helped protect it. Here and there I found copies with prices written in, although the currency is apt to be ambiguous. The best record is in a copy I found in Dresden, where the astronomer Valentin Engelhart in 1545 tallied the prices of several titles bound together. The Copernicus cost one florin, equivalent to twelve groschen. During this time the university matriculation fees were in the range of six to ten groschen, and when Rheticus was being enticed to a professorship in Leipzig, he was offered the special salary of 140 florins per annum. I have wrestled with the value of currency in the sixteenth century for a long time. Personal services and food were cheap in those days, so the relative strength of the money can't easily be compared with living standards today. Perhaps an astronomy professor who took his studies seriously didn't balk at paying about 1 percent of his annual salary for an important volume, but he surely took good care of his book.*
So, WITH 400-500 copies printed in 1543, and 276 accounted for in the Census, where did the missing Copernicus books go? Inspecting hundreds of copies of De revolutionibus has convinced me that water is the chief enemy of books. A substantial number show the traces of dampstaining. For millennia architects have been working to perfect roofs, but every time I visit Harvard's Science Center during a rainstorm, I know it has been a losing battle. And when I served on the Yale Library Visiting Committee, our first assignment was a tour to see how disastrously the roof of the Sterling Library leaked. For every heavily dampstained copy recorded in the Census, there must have been a copy discarded because it was so thoroughly soaked that it turned purple with mildew or simply became papier-mache.
Bookworms have riddled a number of copies. I thought I had never laid eyes on a bookworm, living or dead. Many of my students suppose it's a mythical beast and are incredulous when shown pages perforated by their trails. I didn't remember even seeing a picture of a bookworm, so was taken by surprise to discover that one is shown in Robert Hooke's well-illustrated Micrographia of 1665. From the small, round bores in early books, I had always assumed that the hungry insect was a cylindrical worm, but Hooke's enlargement pretty clearly shows a silverfish. Hooke himself described the insect as "the silver-colour'd Book-worm" and reported that "this Animal probably feeds upon the Paper and covers of Books, and perforates them in several small round holes." In fact, the Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates that a variety of insects qualify as bookworms, with the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) as the leading candidate.
I was pretty puzzled about how a silverfish could create round bore holes, but eventually found the answers from Nicholas Pickwoad, an English expert who was helping Harvard University on its numerous book conservation problems. The silverfish feasts on mold damage, so it proliferates in humid environments. Its damage is generally to the surface of a page or to a leather binding. In contrast, the round bore holes often seen in early books were caused by the hungry grubs of the deathwatch beetle (family Anobidae), which can eat right through the pages of books on a library shelf or penetrate furniture. The beetle lays it eggs near a source of food, for instance, in a crack or crevice of a well-stocked bookshelf, and the larva bores its way through its food supply, sometimes taking as long as ten years before it finally metamorphoses into a beetle. Presumably, the really well-drilled copies of De revolutionibus have long since been scrapped.
The silverfish bookworm from Robert Hooke's Micrographia (London, 1665).
Rodents can make even quicker work of an ill-fated volume. A few years ago the Carnegie Institution of Washington put its library in warehouse storage while its premises were being remodeled. The books were placed on sledges and carefully covered with tarpaulins to secure them against water damage; not until several weeks later did it finally occur to someone to include rat poison in the precautions, but it was already too late. Today the Carnegie Institution has a library with scores of missing spines nibbled away by the rodents.
Fire ranks low in the list of book destroyers. I have tried without success to document whether any copies of Copernicus' book were lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Possibly so, but there is no evidence. A copy was lost when the Great Tower burned in Copenhagen in 1728, presumably another when the Strasbourg Library was destroyed in the Franco-German War in 1870, and a first edition went up in flames when the retreating Nazis deliberately burned the National Library in Warsaw in the autumn of 1944. Demolition bombing in World War II brought about substantial losses of De revolutionibus, in Douai, Frankfurt, Munich, and Dresden.
THE MORE cheerful reverse side of the coin is not the enemies of books but their friends, the booksellers who made it possible to obtain a copy in the first place. When De revolutionibus was published in 1543, printing with movable type had been in use less than a century. Yet by that time modes of international distribution had already been established, primarily through large regional fairs. Printers and booksellers came together especially in Frankfurt, which had already been established as a leading fair in the late Middle Ages. In 1543 it would have been the place for booksellers to pick up a stock of Copernicus' book, always as stacks of unbound sheets.* Being a bookbinder was an entirely different profession from the printer; not until the seventeenth century did it become relatively common for printers to package their wares in cheap temporary paper bindings.
In 1564 a catalog listing the various new titles on offer at the Frankfurt Book Fair was issued, the first in a long-running series of such booklets. Toward the end of the century, when young Johannes Kepler proudly authored his first major book, it too was offered at the fair—but Kepler was devastated to discover that his name was misspelled in the catalog. I didn't have much sympathy for Kepler when I read about thi
s, because he tended to write the K of his name so ambiguously that it could easily be mistaken for an R.† In any event, I became very curious to see a copy of the catalog in question.
One day when I was in Harvard's Houghton Library, it occurred to me to inquire how to find the catalogs in a major German library such as Munich's or Stuttgart's. I knew that the European libraries generally listed their books just by authors, so I wondered whether I would have to know the cataloger's name to find out if the old Frankfurt Book Fair catalogs were held there. I had forgotten about my inquiry when roughly a year later the senior librarian and I bumped into each other in the reading room once again.
"Do you remember your inquiry about the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogs?" he asked. I nodded affirmatively. "Well, we've found them."
I was rather taken aback by the way he put it. "What do you mean, you've found them?" I asked.
He hung his head, at least figuratively, and explained that the library had recently got an inquiry from someone who wanted to produce a facsimile of one of them. It turned out that just before World War II Harvard had bought a leading collection of these catalogs, but they were so complicated bibliographically that no one had had the courage to catalog them, so they just sat in the Houghton stacks until everyone completely forgot about them. The staff finally located the bundle after they realized that they had to be there someplace.
In the early 1970s a German publisher made a facsimile edition of the entire set, except that the catalog for the autumn fair in 1598 couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. Researchers finally traced Harvard's purchase, and there it was, probably the unique copy of the missing catalog. ("Little pamphlets linger least.") It is fascinating to pore over the thin, fragile catalogs, a spring and autumn edition each year, with the books arranged in broad categories, the Latin titles in Roman letters and the German titles in Gothic type: Protestant theology, Pontifical theology, Music, History, Poetry, and "Philosophy, Humane Arts, and Polite Literature." In that latter category in the fall of 1566, the third year of the catalogs, Copernicus' De revolutionibus was listed. It was a folio from Basel, publisher and price not specified. This, the second edition, came from Heinrich Petri, a printer of scholarly works in Basel, possibly a relative of Johannes Petreius of Nuremberg. By 1566 Heinrich had involved his son, Sebastian, the man who would eventually carry on the business under the name Sebastian Heinrichpetri, so in that year the publisher's identification on the title page read "Ex officina Henricpetrina."
The supreme irony of this story is that the Harvard set of Frankfurt catalogs isn't complete. Despite having the unique 1598 catalog, Houghton Library lacks the spring and fall 1597 catalogs, one of which listed Kepler's Mysterium cosmographicum. I now know you have to look under Georg Wilier to find them, but I still haven't actually seen an original copy listing the author Repleo.
INCIDENTALLY, THERE was another way books could disappear—by being deliberately destroyed when they were listed in the Index of Prohibited Books. De revolutionibus was placed on the Catholic Index in 1616.
* Oxford English Dictionary: "The literal meaning of'morganatic marriage' is, as explained in a 16th c. passage . . . a marriage in which the wife and the children that may be born are entitled to no share in the husband's possessions beyond the 'morning-gift'. The distinctive epithet of that kind of marriage by which a man of exalted rank takes to wife a woman of lower station, with the provision that she remains in her former rank, and that the issue of the marriage have no claim to succeed to the possession or dignities of their father."
* lt would, of course, be intriguing to find out how Digges's copy had got from England to Switzerland, but the trail has gone cold. We know only rhat the book arrived in what was then the Geneva Public Library in 1893 from the heirs of a local collecror.
* I assumed that everyone knew what offsetting is, but when both Miriam and my editor queried this term, I realized that my many hours spent in typesetting and my youthful passion as a collector of U.S. stamps had given me a specialist vocabulary. American stamps were originally printed from flat plates, a technique descended from the presses rhat Petreius used. But in 1915 rotary presses were introduced for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which produced the stamps. Because the process of bending the plates into a cylinder stretched the printing surface, such stamps were about a millimeter taller or wider than the flat-plate images. Rotary presses allow continuous rolls of paper to be fed into the press, a technique that made modern newspaper production possible, not to mention the long strips for coil stamps, which the post office desired. From 1918 to 1920 the postal authorities experimented with offset printing. In this process a direct image plate (as opposed to the mirror image plates of the flat-plate and rotary press plates) transferred an inked mirror image onto an "offset" roller, which then printed the actual sheet. These offset printed stamps are distinctly softer than the crisp lines of the direct printing. The mimeograph process, ditto machines, and multilith machines, commonplace in offices in the 1950s and 1960s, used this offset process so that the master sheets did not have to be prepared as mirror images. So to refer to offsetting means that the ink is transferred to another surface and then in turn printed onto the final sheet—in the case of a sixteenth-century press, from the back side of a partially dry page onto the parchment platen or backing sheet and then, unintended, onto the back side of the next sheet fed into the press.
* Distributed is another technical typographer's term, meaning rhar the type has been alphabetically sorted into a special type case, ready to be set again.
* OCLC once stood for Ohio College Library Center but was subsequently generalized to On-line Computer Library Center.
* ln any event, Stoddard put in a successful bid, and today Harvard has one of the world's largesr holdings of Kepler titles, second only to the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart.
* It might be objected that if the 1543 De revolutionibus sells for two or three times as much as the 1687 Principia, it ought to be two or three times rarer. The numbers do not scale this way because Copernicus' book is jusr enough scarcer that the pressure on its price is actually quite disproportionate to its rarity.
* The size of the sixteenth-century library of one Stephan Roth is astounding. He had studied under Luther in Wittenberg and eventually became chief city clerk in Zwickau. I went to see his Copernicus in the summer of 1976 in what was then a drab East German town, but the library was wonderful. Roth had amassed a collection of 6,000 titles in the 1530s and 1540s. Being city clerk must have been a lucrative post!
* Even today the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, held in the fall, brings publishers together from all parts of the world.
† Ursus had mispelled the name as Repler when he seized the opportunity of including Kepler's letter in his scurrilous attack on Tycho Brahe.
Chapter 9
FORBIDDEN GAMES
GEORG JOACHIM RHETICUS needed many months to persuade Copernicus to send his book to the printer. The Polish astronomer's reluctance to publish his manuscript must have arisen from a complicated jumble of reasons and phobias. In the first place, there was no suitable printer nearby to handle a complex technical work, and besides, there were still many details not quite polished to his satisfaction. But lurking in the background was the fear that his ideas about the mobility of the Earth, so contrary to common sense, would lead to his being hissed off the stage. That is precisely how he expressed it in the dedication that he eventually wrote to Pope Paul III.* And he knew that he might be in trouble with some religious sensitivities. Though he explicitly dismissed this in his dedication to the pope, saying, "Perchance there will be babblers who take it on themselves to pronounce judgment, although completely ignorant of mathematics, and by shamelessly distorting the sense of some passage in the Holy Writ to suit their purpose, will dare to find fault and censure my work, but I shall scorn their attack as unfounded," he must have worried about their potential criticism.
Foremost among the biblical verses th
at could cause trouble was a vivid passage from the Book of Joshua.
On that day when the Lord delivered the Amorites into the hands of Israel, Joshua spoke with the Lord, and he said in the presence of Israel:
"Stand still, 0 Sun, over Gibeon
and Moon, you also, over the Valley of Aijalon."
And the Sun stood still and the Moon halted,
till the people had vengeance on their enemies.
Is this not written in The Book of the Just? The Sun stood still in the middle of the sky and delayed its setting for almost a whole day. There was never a day like that, before or since.
The Book Nobody Read Page 14