The Book Nobody Read

by Owen Gingerich

  The meanings of some of these symbols are pretty obvious: the rippling waves for watery Aquarius, the balance for Libra, the arrow for Sagittarius the Archer. Others are more abstract, such as the bushy mane of Leo the Lion, the paired lines for Gemini the Twins, or the horns and face of Taurus the Bull. (Our alphabet may have derived from a denser set of astronomical symbols beginning with Taurus; tipped ninety degrees, the Taurus symbol becomes an alpha.) The two most confusing are the symbols for Scorpio, with the pointed stinger in the scorpion's tail, and Virgo the Virgin, which carries the standard medieval abbreviation for Maria, a capital M with the crossed tail, a shorthand indicating additional letters.

  As with the abbreviation for Maria, the early annotators frequently designated omitted letters with a short line above, below, or behind the nearest letter or over the entire word. The commonest abbreviation is a bar over a vowel, indicating a missing n or m. The system works up from there. For example, oa stands for omnia, or ro can represent ratione, something of an all-purpose word in the technical Latin context, meaning everything from "reason" to "theory" to "thought." In working with the Latin script, I quickly learned to distinguish between p for per and JD for pro. It was much harder to keep track of g for qui, q for quae, and q for quod. In the Census these words are always spelled out, so fortunately I didn't need a virtual type box quite as large as the one Petreius used for setting De revolutionibus*

  The use of abbreviations was generally the compositor's option in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When it was necessary to squeeze the words to get them to fit in a line, he would select more abbreviations from his type box. A few lines later, with a more relaxed spacing, the word might well be spelled out in full. It's particularly interesting to see this process at work in Galileo's Sidereus nundus. The final page is thoroughly sprinkled with abbreviations as the typesetter exercised full control to make sure that the text didn't run over by a few lines onto another sheet. That happened in De revolutionibus, too, at the end of Book V where the typesetter jammed in far more than the average number of abbreviations. The effect also happened in the middle of the signature* marked s in order to finish a chapter before four pages of tables. Probably a virtuoso compositor took over, squeezing in abbreviations like tpe for tempore or qn for quando.

  IN 1974 I made two complicated, adventuresome book-hunting trips to Europe, adding a few dozen more Copernicus copies to the census. At Hertford College in Oxford I encountered a particularly eccentric librarian who suspected me of being a fraud, but he did show me Hertford's unannotated second edition, which had been owned by Thomas Finck, the seventeenth-century physician and mathematician who added the words tangent and secant to the trigonometric vocabulary. That April trip eventually carried me on to Egypt, where the astronomers had been given funding for a Copernican quinquecentennial commemoration, so they enlisted me to add an international note to their one-year-late affair. But in between these stops I went to a conference in Capri that led to a quite unexpected finding about Galileo.

  I knew that Capri was a famous resort destination, but I was quite surprised to discover that the island had no beaches. Just getting there proved to be both a figurative and literal cliff-hanger. The plane from London to Rome was an hour late, and by the time I could catch a high-speed train to Naples, it was one scheduled to arrive five minutes after what I had been led to believe was the last ferry to the island. I had nervous visions of hiring a fishing boat at some exorbitant rate to take me there, little realizing what a substantial distance was involved. Fortunately, the information was wrong; by great good luck I had got out at the right train station, the one next to the ferry terminal, and I just had time to catch what really was the last ferry. I reached the storybook island at dusk, ascended the towering cliffs by funicular, and was soon in the company of some of the leading historians of the scientific Renaissance.

  My role at the conference was to comment on a paper presented by Guglielmo Righini, director of the observatory in Florence. Righini examined in detail Galileo's early drawings of the Moon in an attempt to date when they were made. In 1609 Galileo had learned about a Dutch spyglass that was being sold in the major cities of Europe; he figured out how it could be done and effectively turned what had been a toy into a scientific instrument, with which he discovered the craters on the Moon. His book announcing his discoveries, Sidereus nundus, or "The Sidereal Messenger," was published in March 1610, so the possible dates of his observations were fairly limited. Strangely enough, no one had attempted to pin specific dates onto the two surviving sheets of Galileo's observations, probably because no one before Righini had believed that they were accurate enough to warrant such an investigation. It fell to me to point out that there were serious problems with the images published in Sidereus nundus, which varied in critical ways from the original ink-wash drawings, and that the dates Righini picked were not necessarily unique.

  Although Righini's analysis was flawed, his paper provided the catalyst that ultimately established a precise dating of Galileo's lunar observations and thereby gave an accurate chronology for the swift genesis of his astronomical discoveries. Galileo undoubtedly found the craters on the Moon before he was prepared to record them, but having decided that his discovery was worthy of publication, he subsequently equipped himself with ink, brushes, and a sheet of special artist's paper, and on the evening of 30 November 1609 made two careful depictions of the cratered lunar surface. At four further times throughout December he added images to his sheet, making six drawings in all. But in the week of 7 January 1610 another series of observations, not of the Moon but of Jupiter, suddenly gave an urgency to his publication schedule. After discovering four companion stars revolving around Jupiter, and filled with excitement but fearful of being scooped, he rushed to publish his observations. His Sidereus nundus was in print in just over six weeks after he had delivered the first installment of his manuscript to the printer in Venice—an extraordinarily quick turnaround even by today's standards.

  Galileo's ink-wash drawing of the Moon on 19 January 1610 and his uncompleted horoscope for Cosimo de' Medici; a completed horoscope is on the other side of the sheet.

  In a letter to Kepler written in 1597, Galileo had allowed that, privately, he accepted the Copernican cosmology. In public, however, for more than a decade Galileo apparently never whispered a hint of his radical beliefs. That all changed in 1610 with the publication of Sidereus nundus. Some critics had resisted the idea of a moving Earth, asking how an Earth in orbit around the Sun could keep the Moon in tow. To them, Galileo pointed out that Jupiter, which everyone agreed was in motion, managed to retain its companion moons as it moved across the sky—a powerful Copernican counterargument to the objectors. From this point on, Galileo became ever more open in his defense of the Copernican system, apparently stimulated by the astonishing novelties his telescope had revealed.

  But Galileo had a second agenda in writing Sidereus nundus: He was keen to give up his professorial post in Padua to become the mathematician and philosopher to Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, and to that end he dedicated his book to Cosimo and he named the Jovian moons the "Medicean stars." In this plan he succeeded, and Florence became his home for the rest of his life.

  I made a second trip to Italy in July 1974, and in Florence I discovered what turned out to be Galileo's secret weapon in getting the job at the Medicean court. At the time of the Capri conference I had not actually seen Galileo's original ink-wash drawings of the Moon. Two pages of the lunar images had been carefully reproduced in the so-called National Edition of Galileo's works and correspondence, published in twenty volumes at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was very convenient to use those reproductions in preparing my commentary on Righini's paper. But with my curiosity sparked, I took advantage of a visit to Florence to examine not only Galileo's sparsely annotated copy of De revolutionibus in the National Library but also his astronomical manuscripts. I had long supposed that Galileo was not the sort of astron
omer who would have read Copernicus' book to the very end. Even on that seminal evening with Jerry Ravetz, when we had speculated how few early readers of Derevolutionibus there might have been, we had been reluctant to include Galileo in the list of readers. Unlike Reinhold or Maestlin or Kepler, he was not interested in the details of celestial mechanics. Still, when I saw the copy in Florence, my reaction was one of skepticism that it was actually Galileo's copy, since there were so few annotations in it apart from the standard censorship decreed by the Inquisition in 1620. Eventually, as I became more familiar with Galileo's hand, I realized that my skepticism was unfounded and that it really was Galileo's copy.

  The Galileo manuscripts, on the other hand, proved to be quite fascinating. To my surprise, I discovered that the reproductions of the sheets of lunar drawings in the National Edition were not entirely complete. A single drawing of the Moon on a second sheet, now dated to 19 January 1610, had been published, but an astrological horoscope that shared the page was nicely suppressed. Clearly, it would have diminished Galileo's heroic status as the first truly modern scientist to admit so conspicuously that he was capable of drawing up horoscopes.

  I asked Righini's wife, Maria Luisa Bonelli-Righini, director of the History of Science Museum in Florence, for help in obtaining color slides of the horoscopes (for there was another on the other side of the sheet). They arrived just in time for me to add a postscript to my Capri paper, and there I pointed out that one of the horoscopes could be dated to 2 May 1590 from the positions of the planets it contained. Afterward I felt rather dim-witted that I hadn't taken the next step. Righini, alerted to the horoscopes by my slide request, promptly realized that the date was Cosimo's birthday, and that Galileo had drawn up a birth horoscope for his prospective patron. Indeed, in the dedication to Sidereus nundus, Galileo dwelled on the theme of Jupiter's position in the horoscope, writing with obsequious flattery, "It was Jupiter, I say, who at your Highness's birth, having already passed through the murky vapors of the horizon and occupying the midheaven and illuminating the eastern angle from his royal house,* looked down upon your most fortunate birth from that sublime throne and poured out all his splendor and grandeur into the most pure air, so that with its first breath your tender little body and your soul, already decorated by God with noble ornaments, could drink in this universal power and authority." Astrology never again played a public role in Galileo's work, unlike Kepler's, which included a pamphlet entitled The Sure Fundamentals of Astrology and another defense where on the title page he urged critics not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, saying that he was searching for a few kernels among the dung of traditional astrology. Nevertheless, astrology was part of the ethos of the times, and it is surprising that there is nary a hint of it in De revolutionibus. Nor is there any trace of interest in astrology in anything else that remains from Copernicus.

  * Consider = cum sidera = "with the stars"; disaster = "against the stars" (ill-starred); et cetera,

  † in Johannes Kepler's manuscript legacy there are, among many others, two horoscopes he drew up for himself, one for his birth and the other for his conception. Once when I projected slides of both side by side in my class, a young woman in the second row raised her hand to inquire why rhere were only seven and a half months between the two horoscopes. "Oh," I replied, "Kepler chose his parent's wedding night for the date of the conception." Needless to say, this remark completely cracked up the class.

  * The expert was an authority on Islamic art of the Middle Ages, who was well in tune with that era.

  * There couldn't have been an eclipse at that time. Jesus was crucified the day after Passover, which is locked to a lunar calendar so that it falls near the time of full moon. Solar eclipses occur only at the time of new moon.

  * (But we have observed this business with more certainty via the planet Venus than using the Moon, etc.) The note refers to Tycho's method of comparing the position of the Sun with the stars, which is difficult because they are not visible at the same time. Tycho connected them by measuring the distance from the Sun to Venus (which is visible in the daytime), and at night connecting Venus with the stars. In the text next to the annotation Copernicus described using the Moon for the same purpose. Tycho's alternative method gave improved accuracy.

  * The ecliptic is the great circle of the Sun's path through the zodiac. The paths of the Moon and planets are slightly tilted with respect to the ecliptic, each orbit crossing the ecliptic at two points called the nodes, separated by 180°. An eclipse can take place only when the Moon is near its node, crossing the ecliptic (with the Sun also at a lunar node), hence the name ecliptic.

  * Not counting punctuation, numbers, Greek letters, or the zodiacal signs and planetary symbols, the Nuremberg printer used just over thirty special symbols or ligatures in addition to twenty-three lowercase letters (noy, v, or w, which do nor occur in Latin) and twenty-three uppercase letters (noy, U, or IV).

  * A signature in De revolutionibus comprised four printed leaves, or eight pages. Each signature was coded wirh a sequential letter to assist in the assembly of the book.

  * The two most important zones, or "houses," in a horoscope are the ascendant (the part of the ecliptic circle about to rise over the eastern horizon), here called the eastern angle, and the midheaven (the part of the ecliptic circle about to cross the meridian). In Cosimo's horoscope, Jupiter was in the midheaven, while the sign of Sagittarius, the so-called day domicile of Jupiter, was in the ascendant.

  Chapter 13

  SOPHISTICATED LADIES

  LONG BEFORE I met Alexander Pogo I heard stories of his extraordinary career. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1893, he had begun engineering studies in Liege in 1911. When the Germans invaded Belgium during World War I, he became a prisoner. After the war he finished his degree, but rather than returning to his native land, by then the Soviet Union, he went to Athens, where he landed a job measuring the fallen column drums of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, preparatory to reerecting some of them. Later he emigrated to the United States, where he earned a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago. In the meantime, he had become fluent in eight languages. With this unusual background and his facility with languages, he became an assistant to George Sarton, the man considered the father of modern history of science.

  Sarton's office was in Harvard's Widener Library, though his salary, as well as Pogo's, was paid by the Carnegie Institution of Washington rather than by Harvard. Those who knew Pogo at Harvard remembered that he had his own pet peeves, such as the fact that the great Canon of Eclipses compiled by Theodor von Oppolzer in the 1880s omitted the so-called penumbral lunar eclipses, when the Moon was touched only by the outer shadow of the Earth.

  As Sarton approached his retirement, the Carnegie Institution, which felt some responsibility for Pogo, decided that he could play a useful role as librarian for the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, which it funded in California. Thus, in 1950 Pogo transferred from Cambridge to Pasadena, leaving in time to miss the famous "I go Pogo" riot when Harvard students tangled with local police as they got a bit too rambunctious waiting for an appearance by cartoonist Walt Kelly, who was then spoofing the 1952 American presidential elections in his Pogo comic strip.

  Not only did Alexander Pogo become responsible for the Observatories' library, but he became de facto rare book librarian at the California Institute of Technology. Dean Earnest Watson was building a rare science book collection for that institution, and Pogo took me to see it in 1972 when I came searching for copies of De revolutionibus. With a touch of pride he told me that Cal Tech's copy of the first edition was not the initial one received from Dawson's of Pall Mall, an eminent rare book firm in London. When the first copy came, he inspected it carefully, and his eye caught a page that was wrong, a leaf from a second edition inserted among the leaves of the first edition. This substitution was possible because the 1566 second edition was virtually a page-by-page reprint of the first. Each signature of four leaves end
ed on exactly the same word in both the 1543 and 1566 editions. The easiest giveaway was the fact that the larger initial letters of the chapters differed in the two editions, but there were other differences; for instance, the first edition labeled the diagrams with lowercase letters, whereas the second always used capitals. But the similarity of the pages was such that they could escape notice with a casual inspection. Thus Pogo had every right to be proud of his acute observation. The book went back, and in due time a replacement arrived. But, as it turned out, this was not to be the end of the story.

  Important sources for documenting the movement of rare books are the specialist dealer's catalogs, and here I was very lucky to inherit an extensive collection going from the 1930s into the 1960s. These catalogs had been obtained by C. Doris Hellman, a historian of science who concentrated on Tycho Brahe and who was a collector of modest scale but considerable expertise. Included among her several hundred catalogs was an almost complete set from Dr. Ernst Weil, a man I never met but who was probably the first independent book dealer specializing in early science. Collectors like Lord Crawford, who formed important astronomical libraries in the nineteenth century, relied on generalist dealers to acquire their most precious treasures. In particular, Lord Crawford depended heavily on Bernard Quaritch in London, who dealt across the board in rare books. Not until rare science collecting became less rare was there a niche for a specialist dealer, and Weil seized this opportunity.