The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

Natural History, April, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich Walker & Company, 2004; $25.00

Everybody knows that a book by Nicolaus Copernicus set in motion the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, but it's a safe bet that practically no one alive today has read it. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"), written in a language no longer spoken, went to press while the Polish astronomer lay on his deathbed in 1543. Even sixteenth-century scholars, who traded Latin one-liners at the dinner table, must have been daunted by the technical prose. Accordingly, and despite its provocative content, Copernicus's book initially raised few hackles among Catholic clergy, who did not place it on their "Index of Prohibited Books" until 1616. In his 1959 best seller The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler summed it up as "the book that nobody read."

Was it? In 1970, when Owen Gingerich, then an astrophysicist at Harvard, had a chance to examine a copy of the first edition of De revolutionibus, he was impressed by its extensive annotations. Someone had taken the time to examine all of Copernicus's arguments, even the most turgid mathematical sections. Someone clearly felt the book was worthy of a reading as close as any reading of the Bible or the Talmud. The commentator was unidentified, but the possibility that others might have made such an intensive study of Copernicus was too strong to ignore.

Fascinated by the marginal notes as well as the antiquarian texts themselves, Gingerich became a full-time historian of science. His thirty-year quest to locate, identify, and study all the early editions of Copernicus's magnum opus, with a particular emphasis on annotated copies, became "The Great Copernicus Chase." The chase turned up a rich collection of marginalia, which has led to a deepening understanding of Copernicus's influence and of the intellectual climate of the era. And it culminated, two years ago, in Gingerich's weighty An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus.

Few people are likely to read Gingerich's census, but anyone who appreciates the printed word will gallop through his new account of how it came to be. The Book Nobody Read moves around the world like an espionage thriller--from federal courtrooms in Washington (where Gingerich was an expert witness in the prosecution of a book thief), to Beijing, Australia, Soviet-era Leningrad, and the Vatican. Using investigative techniques worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Gingerich has identified the personal copies owned by such figures as Johannes Kepler and Adam Smith. Many, pace Koestler, bought the book to read it; others became buyers just because it was rare and important.

Gingerich describes their lives so vividly that it seems he's met them in the flesh. Yet whenever the reader begins to tire of historical minutiae, Gingerich throws in charming tidbits of bibliophilic lore. Attentive readers will learn how many books a sixteenth-century printing press could produce in a day, which insects bore round holes through the pages of old books, and how a German library once sold off a copy of Newton's Principia because it was too heavily annotated, only to discover that the notations were made by Newton's contemporary and archrival Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Now that its first editions bring as much as $800,000 at rare-book auctions, De revoutionibus has truly become a book that few can read, at least in its original editions. Spend a few hours, then, with The Book Nobody Read, which, title notwithstanding, is a book to be read by everybody.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W. K. T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.