The Book Nobody Read

by Owen Gingerich

  James Ludovic Lindsay, who became the 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres, modeled his collection on the Pulkovo Observatory's library, which is situated just to the south of St. Petersburg. That library boasted a magnificent collection of early astronomical titles, and what still remains the world's finest assembly of comet tracts, despite Lord Crawford's energetic efforts to catch up. Crawford must have been especially pleased when Otto Struve, director of the Russian observatory, paid a visit in 1875 and brought along as a gift an autograph leaf from Johannes Kepler's legacy, then housed at Pulkovo.

  In 1994, when the Scottish National Museums put on a special exhibition from the Crawford Collection, I had occasion to reflect on several great astronomy collections, in each of which I had worked through the shelves, book by book. "It is hard to rank one above another," I wrote in the exhibition catalog. "Each is astonishing in its own way, with bibliographical discoveries awaiting diligent scholars." Yet, as I thought about them, I realized that I had never looked carefully at the Pulkovo Observatory's library, the great collection whose published catalog had served as the prototype for Lord Crawford's own acquisitions.

  I knew that the Pulkovo library had been on the front lines in the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1943 and that the observatory had been ruined. Of the rare astronomy books, nearly a quarter were lost. A decade after this tragic reduction of the library, Professor Alexandre N. Deutsch, who was at the time the acting director, briefly described the event.

  The observatory presented an awful sight when we climbed the hill along the avenue of the park. . . . A pale, waning moon shining through a cloudy haze illuminated the unrecognizable walls of the main building, which now had holes instead of windows. The domes had collapsed and burned, as had the roof. . . . We descended into the clock basement, where the books of the Pulkovo Library had been placed at a depth of five meters. In the basement's central section the vaults were whole, but the books lay in chaotic confusion. With difficulty we searched out the box with the rare books and incunabula. Soldiers carried the box by hand to a truck at the foot of the hill. Over the following two nights the Leningrad Soviet organized expeditions of the women's militia using several trucks to carry away the surviving stocks of the library. Many staff members took voluntary part in these expeditions. At one point people were forced [by the artillery fire] to get out of the trucks and lie down in a ditch beside the highway. Fortunately the enemy shells fell on the other side of the road and no one was hurt.

  I knew that the precious Kepler manuscripts, the heart of Kepler's material legacy, had been saved, but what else was left in this once-proud library? Consequently, I resolved to go to St. Petersburg to see for myself. When an old friend, Viktor Abalakin, who in the meantime had become director of the Pulkovo Observatory, learned of my interest, he urged me to come. Thus in 1996 I arranged a summer trip to St. Petersburg. Accompanying me was James Voelkel, a young scholar specializing in Kepler; he was keen to view the manuscripts I had seen, which had fortunately been moved from the observatory to the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences shortly before World War II.

  Abalakin met us at the St. Petersburg airport, whisked us through customs, and took us to the observatory, which sits on an attractive ridge in an extensive wooded tract just south of the airport. Rather uncommonly for an observatory, Pulkovo has its own hotel, where we were soon situated in spartan but quite adequate accommodations. Fortunately, a cosmology conference was going on, so catered meals were available with a congenial group of international astrophysicists. The historical central observatory building was a pleasant hike up a gentle slope and through the woods. It had been entirely rebuilt along the pattern of the original observatory constructed by F. G. W. Struve in 1839.

  Comet Hale-Bopp in the sky over Pulkovo Observatory.

  Struve, who had left Germany in 1808, worked first at the Dorpat Observatory (near Tartu in Estonia) and was later brought by Czar Nicholas I to found the new observatory. From Munich he ordered a fifteen-inch refractor, the largest in the world at that time, which he installed in the central dome. Struve also began building a first-rate library, which he cataloged in 1845 in the first volume of the observatory's Annales. He was especially fortunate to purchase the library of H. W. M. Olbers, the German astronomer famous for discovering the second and the fourth known asteroids, and who had formed a virtually complete collection of comet literature. Struve also purchased books especially heavily from the dealers Antiquariat Weigel in Leipzig and Bohn in London, and then he persuaded the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Peterburg to give him the astronomical titles it had acquired through two book-collecting astronomers who had worked for the academy in the eighteenth century.

  The academy conceded the Kepler manuscripts as well. Struve's son, Otto, who would carry on as director from 1862, published an augmented two-volume catalog in 1860. These books constituted the core of the "Struve Library," and the printed catalogs served as the guide for Lord Crawford.

  On the main floor of the rebuilt central building I found the reading room, eerily uninhabited. Locked up partly below ground level were the stacks for the old books of the observatory's Struve Library, which were promptly opened for me. A quick scan of the shelves showed that in major sections the old numbers were continuous, but in other places there were substantial gaps. Inventories had been taken in August and September 1939, on the eve of World War II, and again just after the war, so it was easy to establish which subjects had been preserved almost intact, and which had suffered heavy losses.

  The Struve Library once contained an impressive showing of Kepler's printed works, twenty-four titles or editions, essentially all of his major contributions. Unfortunately, a large number of the Kepler volumes were classified in a section that was heavily damaged in the war. As a consequence, only fourteen of the Kepler titles remained. The elder Struve was particularly proud of having both volumes of Johannes Hevelius' spectacularly illustrated Machina coelestis (1673—79), since most of the stock of the second volume had been destroyed before distribution by a disastrous fire in Hevelius' quarters in Gdansk; the rare pair, which described the instruments and telescopes in Hevelius' Gdansk observatory, escaped the World War II bombardment. I was particularly excited to find both a first and second edition of De revolutionibus, especially because I had thought that the Pulkovo copies had been taken to the Academy of Sciences Library in the town and that I had already seen them there, but this wasn't the case. Both editions had been originally purchased in Wittenberg by their sixteenth-century owners, and unusually, both included the price paid, eighteen and nineteen groschen respectively, compared with the 6—10 groschen matriculation fee at the university.

  On the final evening of my visit the librarian opened the stacks at night so that I could make the fullest use of my time. Since Jim Voelkel didn't have night access to the Kepler manuscripts in the Academy Archives, he came along to look at the books, and presently he discovered something I had overlooked. In cardboard file boxes on the other side of the main aisle was the famous collection of early theses and comet tracts, apparently completely intact. The comet tracts were arranged chronologically, and up through the comet of 1618 there were forty-three tracts, compared to fifty-two in the rival Crawford Collection. However, the Struve Library contained several very important ones not found in Edinburgh. I could have profitably spent a couple of more days in the comet collection alone.

  Eighteen months after my reconnaissance of the Pulkovo library, bad news arrived from St. Petersburg: The precious collection had become the victim of an arson attack on the night of Wednesday morning, 5 February 1997. A gangster had broken a window and had thrown burning oily rags into the library stacks. Firemen arrived, and the books not burned were soaked with water. The news reports were somewhat contradictory, but they suggested that a thousand books were burned and the remainder badly damaged by the water.

  Private communications offered the following scenario: Members of the Russian mafia coveted
the beautiful and conveniently situated site of the Pulkovo Observatory for building a resort hotel and had been frustrated in their attempts to capture part of the observatory land. Three previous attempts had been made to torch the library, and an understaffed St. Petersburg police force was unable to take the matter seriously. The incunabula and some other books such as the precious first-edition De revolutionibus were therefore removed to a safer place. The arson took place when neither Director Abalakin nor the deputy director was in town. Tragically, those books that had managed to escape destruction during World War II became the victims of local intrigue and hooliganism.

  The comet tracts in their cardboard file boxes were particularly vulnerable to fire, but apparently escaped intact. The water-soaked books were removed to the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1988 a terrible fire there had destroyed four hundred thousand books, but a legacy of that disaster is that the Biblioteka Akademia Nauk is one of the world's best centers for restoring damaged books. A carefully restored rare book does not lose its scholarly value, though it would fare less well on the rare book market.

  Unfortunately, this Pulkovo tragedy has yet a further disturbing sequel. In the year following the fire, the second-edition De revolution­bus was stolen, probably in the confusion surrounding the arson. Its bookplate was removed and the copy brought to Munich for auction. Once again my records compiled for the census served to identify the copy, which was promptly seized by the German authorities. However, the Munich police apparently decided that since the Russians had stolen so many books from Germany, they would not send it back. So, to the best of my knowledge, the book is locked up somewhere in Germany.

  At least some of the stories have a happy ending as stolen books occasionally come home. Glad or sad, they each provided terse historical lines in the Copernican Census.

  * Or so I thought. I later discovered that the redoubtable astronomical bibliographer Ernst Zinner had noticed the Kepler manuscript but had not followed up on it.

  * No other person has ever been a leading officer of both of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Philatelic Society!

  Chapter 15

  PUTTING THE CENSUS TO BED

  JUST OVER a decade after the Berlin Wall fell, and after years of anticipation, in the spring and summer of 2001 An Annotated Census of Coperni­cus'De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) was finally in its closing stages. The map of Europe had changed a great deal from the time I began the Great Copernicus Chase. In my lists I had arranged the books alphabetically by country and city, and I had to reshuffle the entries several times. When I started my quest, Europe was neatly divided between East and West, with a line and prisonlike wall meandering through Germany. With the demise of the wall, I had to realphabetize the East and West German lists, merging them into a single roll. That almost made the combined Germany the top contender for copies of the first edition, with forty-five, running a close second to the fifty in the United States. Within the individual countries the towns were listed alphabetically as well, and even this listing got rearranged when Leningrad reverted to St. Petersburg.

  Eventually, I typeset the entries for Russia, which had moved forward from its original USSR position when the census started. Next came Spain and Sweden, and then Switzerland with a disproportionately large section because the description of the important annotations by Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin, in the De revolutionibus in Schaffhausen required ten pages. Throughout the entire research process for the census I had collected photographs of critical pages to document different handwritings, for comparison of marginal diagrams, and to give the general flavor of the annotations. In the end I included a couple of these images simply to show what nearly indecipherable hands were involved. I selected two from Maestlin's copy in Schaffhausen just to demonstrate how microscopic his handwriting was. I suspect he was very nearsighted.

  At last I came to "United Kingdom (England)," another long section because it included thirty-two first editions and thirty-eight of the second, and then to one of the most interesting sequences in the entire Census, "United Kingdom (Scotland)." I'm still amazed by the roulette that brought so many of the most important copies of De revolutionibus to Scotland. This part of the Census begins with Aberdeen, where one of its three copies contains, on interleaves bound into the book, one of three early manuscript copies of Copernicus' Commentariolus. That called for an illustration, as did a curious paper instrument bound into one of its other copies. Next comes Edinburgh, with Adam Smith's copy, John Craig's book with his copies of Paul Wittich's marginalia, the original Jofrancus Offusius copy, and of course the greatest copy of them all, the one with Erasmus Reinhold's magnificent annotations, the description of which takes ten more Census pages.

  At length I came to Glasgow, with its three first editions of De revolutionibus. I sought to illustrate a page with the writing of Willebrord Snell (1580—1626), the astronomer nowadays famous for Snell's law, the formula that expresses how light bends as it enters (or exits) from a glass lens. I hadn't made the final selection of illustrations when in 2001 I started composing the actual camera-ready copy for the Census, so I was in for one more surprise as I went down the home stretch. Folio 81 verso of the Snell copy has at the bottom of the page a nice sample of his hand, signed with the initials Ru Sn, indicating that the comment came originally from his father, Rudolph Snell. But as I looked more closely at the photograph, I realized that someone else, whom I had not identified, had written the notes in the left-hand margin.

  UNLIKE MANY of the relatively unknown astronomers in this story— Reinhold, Wittich, Offusius—Gerardus Mercator has a comparatively high name recognition on account of his map projection. This is the rectangular grid of longitude lines that makes Greenland look as big as the United States. Besides being a redoubtable cartographer, Mercator was a Renaissance polymath: an astronomer, astrolabe maker, engraver, and the man who revolutionized handwriting. Whenever you write a capital E in this shape: £, you are using a form introduced by Mercator.

  Gerardus Mercator's lowercase alphabetfrom his Litterarum (Louvain, 1546) and a sample of his italic hand in an annotation on folio 87 verso in his copy of De revolutionibus, now in the Glasgow University Library.

  Mercator's is still a name to be reckoned with in Belgium, and in 1994 his fans (with the help of local banks) produced a lavish tome chronicling his accomplishments. I was delighted with the book, but what particularly caught my eye was an appendix that concerned his library. In the nineteenth century there still existed a single printed pamphlet listing his books, but this can no longer be found. Fortunately, however, someone had made a handwritten copy, which was typeset and printed in the splendid Gerhard Mercator volume. And there, among his mathematics books, is the entry for De revolutionibus, "cum annotationibus marginalis Gerardi Mercatoris."

  By this time I knew of quite a few "missing" copies of Copernicus' book from references in early catalogs. There are, for instance, the two copies owned by the Elizabethan magus John Dee, who had one of the largest libraries in sixteenth-century England, though his library inventory does not reveal whether he annotated them or not. Similarly, the courtier Sir Walter Raleigh remarked in his Historie of the World (London, 1614) that he owned Copernicus' book, but again, there is no mention of whether he annotated it nor whether he wrote his name in his books. The same is true for the Astronomers Royal John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley.

  But the Mercator record is different. It actually documents that he had written notes in his copy. Since the new Mercator volume included plenty of examples of his handwriting, I could systematically compare them with the microfilms and photographs that I had collected in which the handwritten notes were still unidentified. For example, a mystery copy is the well-annotated De revolutionibus owned by the famed eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, who actually wrote a short essay on the history of astronomy. But the annotations aren't Adam Smith's. They predate him, firmly planted in the sixteenth century, an
d I wish I knew who wrote them because they are extensive and interesting. Alas, Mercator's hand didn't match. On several other mystery copies I had moments of high anticipation, only to realize in the cold light of reality that the Mercator samples did not provide a convincing attribution. So Mercator seemed destined to be another "missing person" as the Census headed toward its completion.

  By what fates I know not, I decided to check the unidentified hand on folio 81 verso of the Snell copy sample against Mercator's hand, something I hadn't done previously because I mistakenly assumed that the annotations in the Snell copy were all accounted for. All at once I realized that I had at last pinned down the missing Mercator copy. A very characteristic and idiosyncratic tail of the letter g was absolutely convincing— those marginal notes clearly matched the cursive hand of the many missives illustrated in the big Gerhard Mercator book.

  But that was not the end of the mystery. As I examined the group of photocopies from the Glasgow book, I realized that a third hand was involved. It wasn't Rudolph Snell's, and it wasn't Jean-Baptiste Colbert's, the French chancellor who owned the book after Snell. The annotations were clearly linked with Mercator's. I knew that the Louvain astronomer Gemma Frisius was Mercator's teacher, but the location of his copy was already known, in the Frisian library at Leeuwarden in northern Holland, and his handwriting was quite different. Johannes Stadius, a prolific calculator of Copernican-based ephemerides, was another member of the Louvain circle, but his copy, too, was accounted for—it ended up in the library of the West Point Military Academy. And the copy of yet another Netherlandish Copernican, Philips Lansbergen, is probably the one in Toronto, with quite different annotations.