The Book Nobody Read

Home > Other > The Book Nobody Read > Page 27
The Book Nobody Read Page 27

by Owen Gingerich


  Frankly, the provenances of the Polish copy are not very enlightening, because mostly they are unidentified or even almost illegibly blotted or trimmed off the page. The Ann Arbor copy tells a better story, but also there the earliest steps are obscure, though the original (and unidentified) annotator got the volume off to an illustrious start in the late 1550s by transcribing the marginalia from Offusius' copy (the one now in Edinburgh). The book later found its way into the distinguished Lamoignon family collection in Paris and appears in their printed catalog of 1770—the catalog itself being a considerable rarity since it was printed in an edition of only fifteen copies! Eventually, the collection was obtained by an English bookseller, Thomas Payne, who auctioned the De revolutionibus in 1791. Its location was unrecorded for the eighteen years from 1791 until 1809, when it was acquired by Stephen Peter Rigaud, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. After his death Rigaud's collection was purchased en bloc by Oxford's Radcliffe Observatory, but in 1935 the observatory's library was turned over to the Bodleian Library, which auctioned the duplicates. Through an agent, Tracy William MacGregor, a Detroit philanthropist, bought the book for £165, and three years later he presented it to the University of Michigan Library.

  Four other copies show a sequence of eight ownerships, two of which begin in the sixteenth century. One is a first edition at Trinity College, Cambridge, which I described in chapter 2. The other, a second edition with a very speckled career, has come to rest, quite appropriately, at the university library in Wroclaw. This is one of several copies annotated by Paul Wittich, but not one of the three that were later purchased by Tycho Brahe, because it apparendy stayed around Wroclaw (Wittich's hometown) long enough for a detailed copy of the annotations to be made by a young fellow townsman, Valentin von Sebisch. The Wittich copy was for a while in the library of the Pollinger College (probably in Bavaria), according to an inscription that I deciphered using my ultraviolet light. A considerably defaced inscription indicates that in 1816 the book was owned by the Russian Baron von Canstadt, who spent much time in Munich; at some point the book went into the Royal Library there, which eventually disposed of the copy as a duplicate. The copy was acquired and rebound by the Royal Astronomical Society in London. Since the copy lacked Rheticus' Narratio prima, which had been included in the published second edition but presumably removed at the Pollinger College because Rheticus was a prohibited author, the Royal Astronomical Society released it as a defective duplicate in 1949, not realizing that it contained one of the most important extant sets of sixteenth-century annotations. The copy was held for some years by the dealer Ernst Weil before Roman Umiastowski eventually bought it. In due time I persuaded Umiastowski that it would make a fine gift to the university library in Wroclaw, and he presented it to the library in 1982. This gift was doubly appropriate, not only because Wittich came from Wroclaw but because Sebisch's copy is also in the university library there.

  The census turned up a splendid parade of owners. Copies were owned by the Escorial architect Juan de Herrera, the astronomer-cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the Venetian music theoretician Giuseppe Zarlino, the Pleiade poet Pontus de Tyard, the humanists Johannes Sambucus and Petro Francesco Giambullari, the antiquaries John Aubrey and William Camden, and the financier Johann Jacob Fugger. Henry II of France, Philip II of Spain, George II of England, Sigismund II Augustus of Poland, Count Egmont, and Elector Otto Heinrich had the book in their collections, as did Duke August, whose library at Wolfenbiittel was the finest in Europe in the early eighteenth century. Among the early owners were Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Thomas Digges, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and a host of lesser-known medical doctors, astrologers, and dilettantes, including more recently the Hollywood actor Jean Hersholt, whose second edition is now in the Library of Congress.

  Of course, not all of these owners actually read the book. The royalty did not annotate their copies, but many others did, leaving behind a precious legacy of the way in which the book was perceived and read during the scientific Renaissance. Clearly, when Arthur Koestler wrote that De revolutionibus was "the book that nobody read" and "an all time worst seller," he couldn't have been more mistaken. He was wrong.

  Dead wrong.

  EPILOGUE

  "WHAT'S GOING on here?" The inquisitor was Don Goldsmith, a confidant and sometime intellectual sparring partner. He had unexpectedly arrived from Berkeley one afternoon in 2000 just as two previous visitors were leaving my office.

  "Oh," I said, playing dumb, 'Svhy do you think anything special's going on?"

  "Well, your ordinary academic visitors don't have revolvers bulging in their pockets."

  Discretion was the order of the day, so I could only hint at the circumstances. He had surmised correctly that the FBI had paid a call, and he undoubtedly suspected it had something to do with rare books and probably with Copernicus, but I couldn't reveal the details then.

  A few months earlier Christie's in London had announced that a first edition of De revolutionibus would be auctioned in their rooms, with an estimated bid of $500,000-$800,000. Scarcely a year before the auction date, a "reader" had ordered up a stack of rare books at the university library in Kiev, and at some point had gone out for a smoke, leaving his jacket and the stack behind. But when closing time came, he hadn't returned, and the stack of books was one volume short, lacking the 1543 De revolutionibus. Six months later a copycat theft took place at the Academy of Sciences Library in Cracow. Suddenly Christie's found itself under siege. The Polish press blossomed with stories that their Cra­cow Copernicus was about to be auctioned in London, and the Polish authorities put in a claim for it. I assured the Christie's experts that their copy was entirely new to me and therefore not one of the recently stolen books, and I could testify that it did not match the missing Cracow copy, whose description I had carefully recorded. They relayed the message to Poland, but to no avail. Two Polish librarians flew to London to see for themselves that the book was not theirs. Their trip was not in vain, however, because they recovered a stolen copy of Galileo's Sidereus nundus that was also scheduled for the auction.

  With just two days to go before the sale, Scotland Yard reported that another claim was being staked, this time by Albania. This threw me into some panic, as it had never occurred to me that any library in Albania would have a copy, especially because, even though it had been a tightly closed country, it was known to be impoverished and with relatively few intellectual treasures. Albania turned out to be a red herring, because the message had gotten garbled. It was the Ukraine making a claim for the missing Kiev copy. I assured the Christie's experts that I had good records on the Kiev copy, and that it was not the copy they were intending to sell. Then, less than twenty-four hours before the auction, a letter arrived from lawyers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stating that they thought the book might be theirs. Believing that the sale had been poisoned, Christie's withdrew the book.

  In a rather bizarre way my researches had paved the way for what the MIT librarians naively thought was a reasonable claim. An eighteenth-century owner of the Christie's copy had been one Louis Godin, a French astronomer who had gone to Peru to measure the arc of the meridian,* and who later became the director of a Spanish academy in Cadiz. I had told the Christie's experts that a second-edition De revolutionibus also owned by Godin was currently at the Dibner Institute at MIT. Subsequently, the Christie's auction description for the first edition included the fact that another copy once owned by Godin was at MIT, but it didn't mention the specific location.

  Sharp-eyed MIT librarians checked their catalog and failed to find such a book because the Dibner Institute is an independent organization on the MIT campus, and its considerable collection of rare science books isn't listed in the main MIT library catalog. But with a little more checking the librarians turned up a disconcerting fact: In 1924 MIT had been given a first edition, which was simply placed on the open shelves; by 1932 it could no longer be found. Like a slumbering gia
nt awakened, the institute had sleepily lashed out, threatening a hold on the Christie's copy. Fully awake, and after the librarians had an opportunity to browse through my records to see how many first editions had been auctioned between 1932 and 2000, they realized the claim was ill-conceived, and eight months later Christie's at last successfully auctioned its first edition with the Godin provenance. It fetched $500,000.

  At this point several international auction houses were asked by a Russian agent if they wished to auction another copy. The staff at Christie's, by now considerably educated about the perils of selling De revolutionibus, replied that they would consider it only if I had checked it out in advance. Very soon I received, via e-mail, digital images of several pages from another first edition. The amateur pictures were distressingly fuzzy, but I could just barely decipher some names of early owners written on the title page. For years I had retained a fading mental picture of every De revolutionibus I had seen, but eventually, of course, the entire database was transferred to a computer, which made searches a great deal faster and more reliable. Checking my files, I quickly ascertained that I had previously examined the copy in the Russian Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad. This was the point at which the well-armed FBI agents visited my office. As it turned out, there was no evidence that the stolen copy had left Russia, so there the matter rested. Presumably, the appropriate Russian authorities were notified, but nothing happened. After a couple of months passed, I contacted an astronomer in St. Petersburg and asked him to inquire after the academy's copy. Within a week the international press carried the news: Twenty rare books were missing from the vaults of the academy library. Apparently, the director had been unaware of the losses, which certainly smacked of an inside job. Curiously, but not without precedence, no public announcement indicated which books had been stolen. Soon, however, the FBI brought me the list. I was shocked to discover that not one but two first editions of De revolutionibus had been part of the haul.

  Four copies had gone missing in two years. In addition, there were the earlier thefts of first editions I had seen at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, and at the University of Illinois Library in Urbana-Champaign. Sad to say, none of these copies has been recovered, leaving me with the dubious distinction of having personally inspected more copies of the first edition than can now be located.

  But a happier adventure spun itself out over a quarter of a century of investigating copies of De revolutionibus. In 19741 had undertaken a field expedition to a series of provincial libraries in Italy, including the Bib­lioteca Palatina in Parma. There I saw a second edition of De revolutionibus, but unfortunately its first edition was nowhere to be found. The librarian even showed me the gap on the shelf where it was supposed to be. I assumed that the volume was simply in use in some library office and gave it no further thought. Sometime later when I happened to tell Robert Westman about the missing book, he remarked that, curiously enough, it had been missing when he tried to see it a year earlier than I had. This information aroused my interest in the book, so I wrote to the library asking for the description of the volume as it appeared in their catalog. My vague memory was that the catalog had mistakenly attributed the Andreas Osiander introduction to the great sixteenth-century classicist Joachim Camerarius. When the description arrived, I realized that I had hastily misread it when I had visited Parma; what the citation actually indicated was that the volume was prefaced by a Greek manuscript poem in the hand of Camerarius.

  I knew of one book, undoubtedly the most fabulous copy in private hands, that matched this description. It had turned up, mysteriously, in the London book market shortly after World War II. Could that copy have been "liberated" by an Allied soldier or by a hungry librarian? Because its then current owner, the extraordinary collector Haven O'More, lived part of the year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I asked him if he would bring his precious book into my office at the observatory. When he did, one afternoon in March 1981, we took it to a dark closet and inspected it with ultraviolet light. The rag paper used in sixteenth-century editions glows under the UV except where ink has been applied. Even if the ink has been carefully washed out, the fluorescence is destroyed, and the writing will still show clearly in contrast to the glowing paper. Similarly, the glue marks from removed labels reveal themselves in telltale traces. But there were none. The book with the Camerarius manuscript poem appeared to have a clean bill of health—no identifying ownership marks had been erased or washed out. Nonetheless, because the description in the Palatina catalog seemed a perfect match, I was prepared to link the book brought to my office that afternoon with the missing Italian copy.

  An unexpected episode a few years later taught me to be more cautious in making such inferences. Pierre Beres, an eminent French book dealer, informed me that he had something of interest concerning Copernicus. When I had occasion to go to Paris, I arranged a visit. Beres then related the following curious tale. An anonymous caller, possibly Italian, had inquired by phone if Beres was interested in some old books, including a first-edition De revolutionibus. When an affirmative reply was forthcoming, the mystery voice said, "You can't contact us, but we'll get in touch with you." Some days later, Beres explained, a packet of photocopies arrived without a return address. The sheets were mostly copies of tide pages, but with that of Copernicus' book were two xerographic copies recording a Greek manuscript poem, and these he produced for me. I saw at once that here was another copy of Camerarius' poem, so I explained the situation at the Biblioteca Palatina.

  "This is surely the stolen Palatina copy," Beres quickly concluded, and he declared that he would abandon the pursuit of the book. With that the trail went cold, leaving me with a troubling dilemma: whether to publish the photocopies in my Census to alert possible buyers to a stolen copy, or to suppress this information lest the thief simply destroy the identifying sheet with the Greek poem.

  After a decade passed, and before I had to make a final decision, the book prefaced with Camerarius' manuscript surfaced once again. This time a New York dealer had caught wind of its existence and had promptly alerted me. Again I said, "On guard!"

  A few weeks later I was telephoned by an expert at Sotheby's in Milan. The Copernicus volume, unbound and in a somewhat disreputable state, had been brought to the auction house by a family in Parma. The book had been acquired by the father, since deceased, who had had a reputation as a local bibliophile, and who apparently did not raise questions about the sources of the books offered to him. What evidence did I have, the voice from Milan inquired, that the book belonged to the Palatina?

  I explained about the catalog description. Apparendy I had had access to a special catalog, not the public one, for my information was news to the Sotheby's representative. He nevertheless reported that he had investigated and discovered that most, if not all, of the books being offered to Sotheby's were listed in the Palatina catalog but were in fact missing from that library, strong circumstantial evidence for their true ownership. However, the absence of specific physical evidence created a sticky problem.

  There the matter rested for several months. Then, in January of 2000,1 received an e-mail stating simply, "Nicolaus is back in the Bib­lioteca Palatina." I'm not sure precisely how this happened, but it was a fitting conclusion to the dogged, adventurous, almost quixotic thirty-year pursuit into the way sixteenth-century astronomers reacted to the most revolutionary scientific advance in more than a millennium.

  *A way to determine the detailed shape of the Earth's globe.

  Appenedix 1

  FROM EQUANT TO EPICYCLET

  CELESTIAL MOVEMENTS are everlasting, Copernicus declared in the title of the fourth chapter of his Derevolutionibus. And only a circle has neither beginning nor ending and can repeat what is past. Although the observed motions are complex, "it is impossible that a heavenly body should be moved irregularly by a single sphere." This could only be accomplished by an inconstancy of the moving power that drives it, and "the mind shudders" at such a prospect.
Although Copernicus did not here single out Ptolemy's equant as an offense, clearly this is what he had in mind.

  Ptolemy's equant produced uniform motion about an imaginary point within the circle that carried the planetary epicycle, causing the epicycle to move around that circle faster on one side than the other. Today we recognize the equant as an ingenious approximation to one of nature's most fundamental laws, the conservation of angular momentum. Without some device to account for its observed effects, the predicted positions of Mars, for example, would be wrong by many degrees.

  For Aristotle, a hard-core geocentrist, with the Earth solidly fixed in the center, the motions originated at the outer edge of the system. The love of God turned the spheres, and the moving power was transmitted more and more slowly from one sphere to another, so that the inner sphere carrying the Moon took nearly twenty-five hours to turn once, whereas the stars spun about more quickly in twenty-four sidereal hours. Kepler, a confirmed helio-centrist, saw the implications more clearly than his Polish master: Mercury, the innermost planet, sped around the Sun the fastest, and therefore the driving moving power had to come from the inside out, somehow residing in the Sun itself. Because the Earth was in winter closest to the Sun, it should soak up that moving power more efficiently then and should move faster. Kepler's mind did not shudder at such inconstancy; he thought it was physically logical.

  Copernicus stood at a crucial transition point as he revised the geometric blueprint but was unable to come to terms with the physical implications of the radical reahgnment. Within his own aesthetic vision he had to generate the observed unequal motion out of combinations of uniform circular motions. Because this part of his cosmology turned out to be a physical dead end, modern secondary sources tend to ignore this rather complicated part of his De revolutionibus, even though it comprised the bulk of the book. Nevertheless, it proved to be the most intriguing and most studied part of his work as far as sixteenth-century astronomers were concerned.

 

‹ Prev