Meanwhile the assistant in the archives had got into a dither worrying about how I could get undeveloped films out of the Soviet Union. Even more troubling were the undeveloped rolls I had brought in from Cairo and Uppsala, two places I had visited en route to the USSR. I spent a rather sleepless night just before my departure. Nevskaya and the assistant at the archives prepared an official document for me and took me to the airport in an academy car. In the end the customs officer looked rather bored by it all and didn't open anything.
ONE DAY AS I was casually looking at slides on my light table, at images I had made of early books, three manuscript initials suddenly riveted my attention. There they were, EWL, in fancy script on the title page of the 1515 Almanack nova, a book of planetary positions. What jolted my memory was the fact that the same fancy unidentified initials appear on the title page of the De revolutionibus owned and annotated by Johannes Kepler. We know Kepler was devastated when his library was temporarily locked up during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but we have precious little information about what books he had in it because almost nothing from his library has been identified. Was I just about to identify a long-lost book once owned by the German astronomer?
Of course, merely the initials EWL were pretty slim evidence. But as I took a close look with a magnifier, I recognized as well the signature of another owner, Hieronymus (or Jerome) Schreiber, and that name, too, was on the title page of Kepler's copy of Copernicus' book. It seemed highly likely that the volume in the slide had also belonged to Kepler, who seldom inscribed his own books. I had photographed it in the university library in Wroclaw—the former German Breslau—and I immediately wondered whether other volumes there might have come from Kepler's library, which seems to have vanished with scarcely a trace.
Because of the Copernican festivities in 1973 and their aftermath, I had traveled to Warsaw fairly frequendy over the years and had learned the ropes well enough to cope even on the rare occasion when by some snafu no one came to meet me at the airport. After General Wojciech Jaruzelski instituted a military government late in 1981 to quell dissent from the ever stronger Solidarity movement, I was no longer keen to return to Poland, but I remained very curious about the books in Wroclaw and concerned about my colleagues there. So in 19841 decided to go once again to Poland and to revisit Wroclaw.
In the university library I spent the better part of a day writing out call slips for every sixteenth-century astronomy title I could think of that might have been owned by Kepler. One minor detail bothered me somewhat: I couldn't find in the catalog a card for Rheticus' Narratio prima, published three years before De revolutionibus and containing the first printed report of the new heliocentric cosmology. A few months before, the only known copy still in private hands had been auctioned in New York for $400,000. Not unexpectedly, such an astronomical price had the effect of bringing another copy out of the woodwork. Friends in the book trade asked if I knew anything about a library called "the house of Mary Magdalene," because a copy that had mysteriously turned up in Paris included a Latin stamp, "Aed Maria Magd." We could only conclude that it was some obsolete establishment.
Since I had seen the Narratio prima on my previous visit to Wroclaw, I still had its call number, so I included it on the list of books to be fetched even though I hadn't been able to find the card in the catalog.
After some hours I had before me a huge array of books, about a hundred titles. First the good news: Hidden deep inside the Almanack nova with the initials EWL and Schreiber's signature, I found a whole manuscript page in Kepler's hand, previously unknown.* My hunch had been right; the volume of planetary positions had belonged to Kepler. The bad news: There were no other books with a Keplerian provenance. However, I kept finding book after book with the stamp "Aed Maria Magd." And most disconcertingly, the Narratio prima seemed not to be included among the cart full of volumes that had been fetched for me. As I left for lunch, I drew the librarian's attention to the fact that Rheticus' book had been overlooked.
When I returned in the afternoon, the librarian's face was ashen. The Sammelband—that is, a collection of small books bound together—supposedly containing the Narratio prima had in fact been fetched for me, but Rheticus' small tract was missing, carefully removed from the collection, and its loss cleverly concealed by pressing the book more tightly together. In my absence the worried librarian had gone back through the records to the previous time the volume had been fetched, and then he had collected all the other books that had been called for at that same time. Two other small tracts turned out to be missing as well.
"Let me guess," I said. "One is Copernicus' small book on trigonometry, De lateribus, and the other is Rheticus' Orationes duae."
The librarian's astonishment was palpable. How could I have known? "Easy," I replied. "Those are the other two unusual books also being offered in Paris. You had better get in touch with Interpol right away." Obviously, the thief had been knowledgeable about old books and clever in the way he covered his tracks by removing the cards from the catalog.
It was much easier for me to give this advice than for the librarian to take it, for at that time no academic wanted anything to do with the bureaucracy of the Polish military government. Besides, the librarian himself could get in trouble for not having proper security in place. If truth be told, this is the gut reaction of librarians worldwide, who tend to keep their losses dark secrets.
After I returned home and a few months had passed, I realized that nothing was happening on the international front with respect to the missing books. By chance I encountered the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Harvard Yard, and I told him what I knew about the theft.
After that, the authorities sprang into action, and Interpol took an active interest in the matter, both in France and in the United States. On behalf of Interpol, the Boston office of the FBI sent an agent to interview me, and I told him what I had heard about the books being offered for sale in Paris.
The next thing I learned was that a lawyer had walked into the Polish embassy in Paris, had plunked down a package saying, "My client no longer needs this," and had turned on his heels and left. The embassy was totally baffled to find two old books in the package, but shipped them to the History of Science Institute in Warsaw, where my friend Jerzy Dobrzycki was about to become director. He and his colleagues recognized the contents, so they returned the Narratio prima and the De lateribus to Wroclaw.
And what about the third missing book, Rheticus' Orationes duae? It had been sold to a dealer in Liechtenstein, who had in turn sold it to a library in Rheticus' birthplace in Austria. The Liechtenstein dealer stonewalled, and the Wroclaw library did not have enough funds to force an international lawsuit, so the stolen copy of the Orationes duae has not come home.
THERE WAS always a certain amount of tension involved with going behind the iron curtain, sometimes with unexpected tragicomic elements. Miriam and I particularly recall our last visit to Halle, the successor university to Wittenberg. In an earlier visit to this East German town I had uncovered the fact that the second-edition De revolutionibus listed in the library's catalog had disappeared. Over the next few years I made two interesting discoveries relating to Halle's collection. First, I found its lost De revolutionibus in the Lenin State Library in Moscow, inscribed by the university rector as a gift to the Russian general who had "liberated" them. Second, the Halle University Library apparently had another copy of Copernicus' book, which I was determined to see.
On the second visit, in 1987, my way was temporarily barred by a party functionary who worked as an assistant librarian. He proved to be a formidable gatekeeper, not at all ready to give me access to the library's precious volume. He insisted on giving me a lecture, in German, on communism, adding that some of the older professors still believed in God, but the younger ones were more enlightened. "What do you need to know about the book that you can't learn if I look at the book and tell you?" he wanted to know. In the strained conversation, which st
retched my spoken German to the limit, I finally caught on that he was highly resistant to showing me the book because one of the library's copies was missing.
"Ah, but I know where your missing book is," I announced in unde-clined German.
Now the Marxist bulldog perked up. Where did I think it was? he wanted to know. I explained that I had seen it in the Lenin State Library and that it was the gift of the university rector to the liberating Soviet army.
"Ausgeschlossen!" he replied. "Completely out of the question. The rector wouldn't have had any right to give the book away without the approval of the Senate. You are mistaken."
"It's in Moscow," I retorted, "and it's bound with Stadius' Tabulae Bergenses."
With that he snorted and bounded out of the office to have a look at the card catalog to see if the missing copy was bound with a book by Johannes Stadius. Presently he returned, completely shaken. It was as if his confidence in the entire system had just collapsed. The catalog had confirmed that the missing Copernicus volume was indeed bound with the Stadius, so I could hardly have invented the report. Shattered, he led us into the reading room and showed me the remaining copy of De revolutionibus, meanwhile breaking every library rule that he had earlier forced me to read. He leaned on Copernicus' book, took notes with his pen, and spoke English. Behind his back the other librarians winked at us. My wife, Miriam, the silent observer of this episode, could hardly contain her amusement, especially as she watched the expressions on the faces of the other staff members.
Later I got an apologetic letter from the head librarian, who hadn't realized we were visiting. I have often wondered what became of that assistant after the demolition of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989.
The reunification of Germany brought one pleasant if unanticipated benefit for the library in Zittau, a small East German border town tucked in the corner of Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. I suppose few Americans had ever penetrated to the Christian-Weise-Bibliothek, so I was treated like a celebrity when I arrived there in August of 1976. The staff showed me not only their first-edition De revolutionibus but the original printing of Newton's Principia and a series of other scientific rarities including an almost complete set of major Keplerian titles. It was worrisome to see so many treasures in a relatively unpretentious and insecure library, and my apprehensions proved all too well founded thirteen years later.
Late in the summer of 1989 the London book dealer Rick Watson called to see if I could shed any light on the provenance of a De revolutionibus to be offered at an auction in Cologne. He told me that it contained an inscription dated 1733, and also that it had an errata leaf inserted between folios 194 and 195. This latter information made the search quite easy, for I had kept a separate list of copies with the scarce errata leaf, and I could almost instantly establish that the only copy known to me with an errata leaf bound in that spot was the copy recorded in Zittau. My notes also showed that this copy had an inscription dated 1733. Clearly, the copy at the Cologne auction had come from Zittau, but the question remained whether the book was stolen or legitimately deaccessioned.
I attempted to contact my East German colleagues in Jena, but as luck (or a collapsing infrastructure) would have it, the university's fax was out of order. Next I tried to telephone the director of the Archenhold Observatory in East Berlin, a friend with a deep interest in the history of astronomy, but a regional telephone operator informed us that no one answered there. Fortunately, the German astrophysicist who had assisted with the call remembered that an East German astronomer, Hans Haubold, was posted to the United Nations in New York, so we contacted him.
"Our fax does work," Haubold assured us, so he promised to investigate the situation at Zittau. Meanwhile, the auction date was rapidly approaching, and we heard nothing from him. At last he called to say that Zittau owned the book, but he hadn't been able to ascertain if the book was actually there.
"Of course it isn't," I explained again. "It's in Cologne, and if the library at Zittau isn't trying to sell the volume, they had better put in a claim instantly."
Rick Watson agreed to break the news to the auction house, which he did, but then I lost track of the events. Later I got two mutually contradictory reports of what happened. In the first version, the East German ambassador had put in a claim for the Copernicus book, but something about West German law required that if a book had been advertised for auction, as it had been in Cologne, then it couldn't be withdrawn. According to the West German press, the auctioneer had stated that the ownership of the De revolutionibus was in question, and then proceeded to auction the book to a dealer not noted for his scruples.
Two months later I received a letter from the East German plenipotentiary to the United Nations, stating quite clearly that the request from the German Democratic Republic for assistance had been turned down by the Federal Republic of Germany. According to this second version, the East Germans then had hired a lawyer, and the book was seized by the Cologne district attorney two days before the auction. However, the book had not yet been returned. In a divided Germany the Zittau library did not have the hard currency to wage a legal battle to get the stolen book back. The ambassador included his thanks, but it wasn't obvious that the book would be returned to Zittau.
When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the legal situation quickly changed. Finally, early in 1992, a letter arrived from Zittau, thanking me for my intervention, and reporting that as of November 1991, the book was safely back in the Christian-Weise-Bibliothek. "This is the second time we have temporarily lost the book," the librarian added. "During the Second World War it, together with many other valuable books, was taken into Czechoslovakia, and they did not come back until 1957."
SOON AFTER the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union crumbled, opening a window on a closely guarded secret. I had accidentally learned—an unintentional mistake on a Soviet librarian's part, as it turned out—that the Lenin State Library in Moscow held six copies of Copernicus' book, three of the first edition and three of the second. She had shown all six copies to a visitor, who had noticed which ones were annotated. I had seen five of them, but try as I might, I could never examine the sixth copy, one of the three second editions. I was told it was "in conservation" and unavailable, and each time I requested a microfilm, the library sent me a reel with a copy I had already inspected. Finally, Miriam said, "Look at this article where an American scholar describes all the excuses the Russians give when they don't want you to see something. It's the same thing that is happening to you!"
So I had to face the possibility that my census would simply have to omit the description of a copy known to be rather heavily annotated. There the matter stood until the winter of 1990-91. Then, a year after the wall fell, and as the Soviet empire was collapsing, I got a telegram from a historian of astronomy in Moscow. "If you want to see the sixth Copernicus, come now. You will be our guest while in Russia."
Extravagant as it seemed to fly to Moscow in January to inspect one copy of Copernicus' book, it also appeared to be an especially interesting time to see what was going on in the former Soviet Union. Within twenty-four hours of my arrival in Moscow I had seen and photographed the Copernicus volume, a particularly interesting second edition well annotated by Herwart von Hohenburg, the chancellor of Bavaria and a frequent correspondent with Johannes Kepler (plate 7c). But one thing struck me as odd: Clearly, the book had never needed, nor ever had, any conservation, despite the librarians' previous excuses when I had asked to see it. When the young postdoc who had taken me to the library remarked that he had been there the previous day to make sure the book would be available, and that he had been quizzed as to whether I really had permission to see the book, I realized that something fishy was going on. I finally confronted my host, who with mild embarrassment revealed the real situation.
After the Second World War the Soviets captured truckloads of books from East German libraries in reparation for their own tremendous losses. However, by the Geneva Conventio
n, these books could be considered cultural treasures and hence subject to return. In particular, the Copernicus volume had come from the Leopoldiana, a venerable natural history academy in Halle. Under the circumstances the Soviets naturally didn't want foreigners mucking about in their holdings. Eventually, I had an opportunity to mention this to the head of the Library of Congress, a specialist in Russian studies, who allowed that the experts had always suspected this, but my report was the first actual evidence.
As THE IRON curtain disintegrated, it occurred to me that I had never really examined one of the important collections that was, in a sense, a distant background to my Copernicus chase story. The Crawford Library at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, where I had stumbled across the well-annotated De revolutionibus owned by Erasmus Reinhold, had been inspired by an extraordinary Russian collection. The Edinburgh library was established by a scion of a noble Scottish book-collecting family, the Lindsays. Alexander William Lindsay, the 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres, had formed the leading private European library in the second half of the nineteenth century. It included an outstanding collection of Bibles in all languages, among them the Gutenberg Bible, all the early editions of Luther's translations, and the exceedingly rare Eliot Indian Bible printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1663. Natural history, the classics, and manuscripts in oriental languages all had their place as well. The earl's eldest son, James Ludovic Lindsay, developed a fascination with astronomy, and his well-equipped observatory became the envy of the professional astronomers throughout the land. In such a home environment he could hardly help but include a collection of rare astronomy books in his observatory, and his astute buying built up a fabulous scientific library. He donated this collection, along with his instruments, to Scotland in 1888 when his tastes turned increasingly to his yacht and his stamp collection.*
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