Copernicus from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Copernicus . . . . . mar 28 2004 — bookish105.dat

"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."

So ends The Book Nobody Read [buy at amazon] ,Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus", by Owen Gingerich, and by the time you have finished reading it you will have learned a huge amount about the world of 16th century scientists and astronomers, scientific practice, teaching, and publishing. And if you're half the scientist I think you are, or as curious about the foundations of the modern world as I am, you will have loved every minute of reading this astonishing book.

As chance would have it, Gingerich, an astrophysicist and professor of history of science at Harvard University, had been chatting about that very passage from Arthur Koestler, only a few days before he had the opportunity to examine a copy of Copernicus' groundbreaking work. What he found surprised and fascinated him and got him thinking. The work was heavily annotated, not just in the initial portion where Copernicus sets forth his heliocentric cosmology (Earth goes around the Sun, rather than the biblical everything goes around the Earth), but all the way through right to the very end, encompassing a rather technical exegesis of orbital calculations.

Well, obviously at least one person had read De Revolutionibus, and quite carefully at that. What would an examination of other copies reveal? How many copies had survived the intervening 480 years? And as far as that went, how many copies had there been to begin with? And of course, where were the books and to whom had they belonged? The fact that there was no comprehensive census of this particular volume did not make the task any easier.

This fascinating, well-written and readable memoir, written after Gingerich's inventory of all the 1st and 2nd editions of Copernicus' classic was completed and published, is an adventure in the history of science in the 16th century which took Gingerich far afield, to rare book libraries and private collections all over the world. By 1620 copies of De Revolutionibus, both censored and uncensored, were strewn across the map of Europe. Just waiting to be marked up, bought and sold, microfilmed and studied, and naturally, purloined.

The Book Nobody Read is enriched by maps and drawings, and by photographs taken by the author and Charles Eames, who accompanied him to Poland and Sweden for photo shoots, and with whom he collaborated in his Venice (CA) studio on a Copernican Revolution exhibit sponsored by IBM.

Index of Previous Journal Entries

If you like what you read, click here to sign up for our mailing list and we'll notify you when we post new book reviews