The Book Nobody Read

by Owen Gingerich

  The V & A copy is unique in the census with its deliberate fake binding. Many copies have been rebound, of course, to replace shabby or tattered covers, without any intention to fool anyone. On the market, copies in original bindings in good condition fetch a higher price than those rebound, so an owner always faces a dilemma in replacing an old but dilapidated binding. Occasionally I have encountered disgusting cases of modern library-buckram, but more frequently tasteful imitations of earlier binding styles, though never undertaken with the goal to mislead a naive collector. There is a sort of intermediate situation, however, when an old binding has been transferred from another book. Cognoscenti call this a remboitage*and when it is recognized, it definitely lowers the value of the book compared to a copy with a comparable original binding.

  WITH SO MUCH indirect experience with book auctions, I finally decided I should see one for myself. So after the manuscript of the Census had been sent off for publication, I resolved to go to a Sotheby's auction to observe a De revolutionibus on the block. Accordingly, early on the morning of 16 November 2001 I flew to New York for the sale of the Friedman collection.

  The collector, Meyer Friedman of San Francisco, was the medical doctor who made famous the concept of Type A and Type B personalities. He demonstrated not only that certain personality traits correlated with higher risk for heart attacks, but that by working to suppress some of the pushy or aggressive behavior, Type A persons could actually reduce their chances of having a heart attack. As a collector Dr. Friedman acquired the great medical titles, such as Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the great illustrated anatomy text, and William Harvey's much rarer De motu cordis (1628), the first correct analysis of the circulation of the blood. But his collection also included pure science works as well, including those by Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein.

  The fake Grolier binding on the De revolutionibus in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  I never met Dr. Friedman because I had already seen his copy of Copernicus' book when it was still in the hands of its previous owner, Marcel Chatillon, a French surgeon. Chatillon practiced in the former French colony of Guadeloupe, and he collected regional art and Americana. De revolutionibus fell in the latter category because Copernicus mentioned America, "named after the sea captain who discovered it." The Polish astronomer was misled on this matter because he relied on Martin Waldseemiiller's Cosmographia introductio of 1509 for news about the New World, but nevertheless his fleeting reference to Amerigo Vespucci was enough to qualify his book as an Americanum.

  Dr. Chatillon showed me his copy in Paris. I still cringe whenever I recall our conversation: Chatillon spoke no English, and my spoken French could charitably be called rudimentary. Nevertheless, I heroically carried on in French as I examined his relatively ordinary copy, measuring its page size, noting the binding and the position of the errata leaf, and hastily scanning for annotations. As it turns out, I missed the two minor marginal notes and failed to investigate carefully the most interesting point in the book, its somewhat weathered final leaf.

  In 1978 Dr. Chatillon sold his Copernicus copy, and it went into the Friedman collection. When Dr. Friedman acquired it, a first edition was still relatively easy to find, and he got the book for 365,000. During the 1970s and 1980s twenty copies passed through the market, but ten of them moved to institutional libraries, gradually contracting the number of copies available for private owners. By 2001, when Sotheby's announced the Meyer Friedman sale, only about twenty copies remained in private collections, and with the rise in cyber fortunes owned by the newly wealthy with interests in science and technology, the competition to obtain a copy had built to volcanic proportions.

  The austerely elegant auction room at Sotheby's took me by surprise. There was not a book in sight apart from the sale catalogs carried by the potential buyers, a group of twenty-five who were mostly dealers. I recognized several from London and others from the West Coast. On a raised dais along the side and front were nine phone stations for anonymous bidders, and in the back was a long table with computers, whose operators apparently controlled a screen in the front that would show the lot number and current bid in ten different currencies. As the group assembled, I introduced myself to Selby Kiffer, one of the Sotheby experts, who promptly asked if I wanted to see the Copernicus. Indeed I did, so he fetched it from the back room.

  Several dealers gathered around as I reacquainted myself with the book. I took a hard look at the last leaf, a bit scruffy with a library stamp totally removed and carefully patched with a paper repair. Clearly, the leaf had been remounted, but I saw no reason to doubt its legitimacy in the volume. I turned the book back to Kiffer and settled down in one of the hundred portable chairs whose rows formed a square in the middle of the room. The clerks took their places behind the phones. David Redden, the auctioneer, ascended the spotlighted podium in the front and asked, "Shall we begin?"

  The bidding on various lots moved sequentially and swiftly, by standard increments, $ 25 for the lower range, for example, or $ 500 when the bids got over $ 5,000. There was no accidental bidding by someone scratching his nose—even the catalog made that explicit. Bidders held up their hands, and Redden frequently indicated who had the current bid, with a phrase such as "in the third row" or "Selby's phone." Otherwise the auctioneer limited himself to the figures—the lot numbers, which came at a rate of about one a minute, and the bids. It was very rare that he announced the author or title on the block.

  By the time the sale approached lot number 34, the De revolutionibus, the assembled dealers realized, with some shock and even more curiosity, that about 80 percent of the books were being snatched up by an anonymous telephone bidder, designated as L020, and most of the others were going, after a duel of phones, to a second anonymous bidder, L029. Several of the rarer items had already gone well above the high end of the estimated bids.

  The auction had been under way barely half an hour when lot number 34 flashed on the screen. I set my stopwatch. Did the bidding start at $100,000 or $200,000? I was too excited to remember, but the auctioneers say it was $150,000.1 was later sorry that I hadn't registered for one of the numbered bidding paddles so that I could have made the first offer, even though I would have had to mortgage the house to back it up. The bids came from the floor at a furious rate, notching up by $25,000 intervals. At first the bids came too rapidly for the phone bank to compete, until the offers passed the high estimate of $400,000—elapsed time, forty-five seconds. The highest floor bid came in at $550,000, already past the previous auction record for a first edition of De revolutionibus, and then the battle devolved to three anonymous phones. I could overhear a Sotheby's representative say, "It's now at $600,000. Do you want to raise?" And L020 raised.

  Moments later, the bidding stopped. The auctioneer tapped the hammer at $675,000. With Sotheby's hammer fee, the book had cost L020 almost exactly $750,000.1 clicked my stopwatch. The bidding had taken two minutes and sixteen seconds.

  The sense of curiosity in the room was palpable. Who were these mystery bidders? The rest of the auction gave only limited clues. The initial printing of a thousand copies of Darwin's On the Origin of Species had sold out on the first day, but the edition is not particularly rare and Sotheby's high estimate of #35,000 was entirely reasonable. Nevertheless, the two telephone duelists drove the price to a sublimely ridiculous $150,000. Experienced collectors would have already owned this classic, and no institution could have been so reckless with its funds. Clearly, the two collectors were beginners, going after an instant library, keenly chasing both the medical and the more strictly scientific items.

  In the auction's aftermath there was a great deal of speculation, and no hard facts, about the identity of the well-heeled buyers. And there was a lot of second-guessing about the status of the Copernicus book itself. "There is a real problem about that last leaf," Rick Watson assured me. A longtime and well-trusted friend among the London book dealers, Rick had noticed that the chain lines o
n the leaf did not run parallel with the edges of the printing, a detail that had escaped my inspection. Since the conjugate leaf was not skewed in the printing, the final leaf had to have come from somewhere else. Clearly, it was a sophisticated copy.

  I checked my records again. The book had been auctioned at Drouot in 1973, and sure enough, it lacked the last leaf. Had it passed through Scheler's shop? The team that added a fake water stain in the Cal Tech copy could have fabricated a page with a fake patch to cover a phony library stamp. That would be enough to keep almost anyone from looking too hard at the page. To my eyes the leaf passed muster; it was similar to a number of copies I had seen in which the wear and tear on the first and last pages was relatively harsh. My notes showed that the Scheler shop formerly had two copies in which the last leaf was probably in facsimile. The genuine leaf in the Chatillon-Friedman copy could have come from one of those Parisian copies. Someday, no doubt, their owners' names will become known. Then I would certainly relish the chance to inspect any of those copies more thoroughly.

  Meanwhile, there are several collectors impatiently waiting to spend a million dollars on an unsophisticated first edition of Copernicus' book in an original sixteenth-century binding—preferably a copy with a known provenance and clear title.

  * Nor a great contribution to letters, nor a very sound translation, this publication was Copernicus' way to learn Greek.

  † Posner told me that many years earlier he had been shown a novelty, a small neon bulb. "That gives bright light," he said. "What are you going to use it for?" He was told it worked just fine for testing automobile spark coils, but his bright idea was to make neon advertising signs. He remarked that Pittsburgh had some of the oldest neon signs in existence because in the early days the anodes were made of heavy plarinum. With his resulting fortune he was able to acquire a formidable collection of rare books.

  * Ir would be pleasant to think that the P stood for the printer's name, Petreius, but P is such a common watermark that experts believe it simply stands for Papier, the German or French word for paper.

  * A French word meaning more generally something placed into a socket.

  Chapter 14

  THE IRON CURTAIN:

  BEFORE AND AFTER

  IN LENINGRAD a gentle snow was falling even though the calendar read April. From my window in the old Astoria Hotel I could look out on St. Isaac's Cathedral. A woman was sweeping the snow off the sidewalks. A Russian historian of astronomy, Nina Nevskaya, had come to meet me at the airport, flowers in hand, but she hadn't been allowed to ride back into town with me in the car Intourist had provided. I was an alien speaking a foreign tongue in a strange and forbidding land. It was 1976, Leonid Brezhnev was in power, and Leningrad was very much behind the iron curtain.

  My first goal was not Copernicus but the world's greatest concentration of Kepler manuscripts. This lion's share legacy had been in St. Petersburg ever since the prolific mathematician Leonhard Euler had persuaded Catherine the Great's minister of finance to buy them for the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1773.1 was staying within walking distance of the Academy Archives, where the eighteen thick volumes of Kepler's manuscripts are now preserved, but unfortunately the demon Intourist driver had whisked me off from the airport before I could get good instructions from Nevskaya as to exactly where the archives were. On Thursday morning I walked across the Neva River, past the Lomonosov Museum into the thicket of streets on the island where the scattered academy buildings are located, and promptly got lost. I ended up at the Academy Library, which I had visited before in order to see its Copernicus books, and there I encountered an American graduate student who shepherded me down the street to the archives. Once inside, I found it exciting to handle, among others, the volume of Kepler's Mars researches, whose microfilm I had pored over so intensely.

  Eventually, I ran up against some mysterious fetching limit. Had I had my quota of volumes for one day? It's like being an exile at the end of the Earth when you can't speak the language. In any event, Nina Nevskaya found me and took me in hand; we went by trolley to the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library to begin the paperwork so that I could see its Copernicus volumes later. Friday was taken up at the Pulkovo Observatory on the outskirts of Leningrad. There I gave a colloquium, speaking as distinctly as I could in English and very slowly. Afterward I had a chance to see its venerable library. The "great" works—the Keplers and Coperni-cuses— had seemingly all been transferred to the Academy Library, which left a host of minor works, one of the most complete and fascinating collections of little sixteenth-century textbooks I have ever examined.

  This left Saturday to see the Copernicus books. Nevskaya fetched me at the hotel—she was afraid I would get lost again—and by 11 A.M. I was back at the Academy Library and had before me its three De revolutionibus copies. As I knew from a previous visit, each of them was annotated. Nevskaya left me there so that I could work at my own pace in documenting the marginalia more carefully than I had done six years before. The first copy, a first edition, had an English provenance and had been bought in London by a Polish aristocrat; precisely how it got from his Warsaw library into Russia is unknown. The main annotations, in a fine, nineteenth-century hand, derive from a copy of the second edition now in the Warsaw University Library. Another first edition contained typical and rather uninteresting sixteenth-century student notes derived from the text itself; at the end of the volume there was a long account of what the Egyptians knew of the sky and geometry (in truth, not very much). The second edition was the most interesting of the trio, with a relatively large number of references to sixteenth-century textbooks and, on its title page, references to two scriptural passages against the mobility of the Earth and a quotation from Ptolemy indicating how ridiculous the Earth's motion would be.

  For better or worse, I was completely on my own getting back to the Saltykov-Shchedrin library. I returned to my hotel and lunched on chocolate and cheese that I had brought from Sweden on the previous segment of my expedition. That was easier than coping with the language barrier. Then I walked back down the Nevsky Prospect to the library. Before the revolution the Saltykov-Shchedrin was the great westward-looking library in Russia, with the kind of fabulous collections associated with major national libraries, but it had been reduced to secondary status when the Lenin State Library in Moscow took the lead. Even now the Saltykov-Shchedrin is a major depository of early books. I knew its rare book library was closed on Saturday, so it seemed inconceivable that I would get anywhere on my own in the main reading room at 3 P.M. Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, I went through the motions: queuing up to check my coat, showing my card and getting a control pass, and then wending my way through the labyrinthine corridors to the reading room, exactly as in the dry run made with Nevskaya on Thursday. I handed over my control pass without saying a word. The attendant beamed and promptly turned up with two Copernicus books! They had been transferred from the rare book room to the main reading room so that I could inspect them.

  I had guessed the library might have a copy of the second edition, which it did, but this copy was pretty uninteresting. Its copy of the first edition was another matter. When I turned to the title page, the handwritten motto "Axioma astronomicum . . ." popped right out. It was the famous—to me at least—motto that Reinhold had inscribed in his book, and which Wittich had transcribed into his De revolutionibus that is now in the Vatican— though then I was still under the misapprehension that Tycho had annotated that one. I quickly paged through the Leningrad copy, noting the standard Reinhold passages copied into the margins. But there was yet another hand with "Ego (Tycho Brahe) . . ." in three places. These first-person references seemed at least superficially to match what I then mistakenly believed was Tycho's hand. I felt almost giddy two hours later as I walked back to the Astoria, confident that I had bagged yet another De revolutionibus owned by Tycho Brahe.

  Sunday was a day for the museums. One of my rules of Copernicus chasing was to arrange the itinerary so as to be
in an interesting place on Sunday, since opportunities to look at books on the Sabbath are decidedly unusual. I walked myself limp in the Hermitage and in the afternoon visited the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in the former Kazan Cathedral. Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno loomed large there, but the place of honor was reserved for wax models of an inquisitorial torture chamber a la Madame Tussaud.

  Early Monday morning I took the black case with my photographic lamps to the archives where the Kepler manuscripts resided. The one assistant who spoke some English looked at it in horror.

  "I will ask our director," she said. Moments later I was ushered into Madame Director's office, given a desk, and told to go to work. All day long I photographed Kepler manuscripts to my heart's content, making a series of color slides that have decorated my lectures ever since.

  Elsewhere I had set things in motion to photograph the De revolutionibus at the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, but there the answer was "nyet." I had spoken too enthusiastically about my discovery, and the Russians decided they wanted to publish it themselves. By the time they did, I had found out that the handwriting was not Tycho's, so their account was pretty well botched up. The book still remains one of the mysteries of the census, but it clearly reflects some lost copy with Tycho's own annotations.