Product Description

In the spring of 1543, as the celebrated astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, his fellow clerics brought him a long-awaited package: the final printed pages of the book he had worked on for many years, De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). Though Copernicus would not live to hear of its extraordinary impact, his book-which first posited that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe-is recognized as the greatest scientific work of the sixteenth century.

Four and a half centuries later, astrophysicist Owen Gingerich embarked on an extraordinary quest: to see in person all extant copies of the first and second printings of De revolutionibus. He was inspired by two contradictory pieces of information: Arthur Koestler's claim, in his famous book The Sleepwalkers, that nobody had read Copernicus's famous book when it was published; and Gingerich's discovery, at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, of a first edition of De revolutionibus that had been richly annotated in the margins by Erasmus Reinhold, the leading teacher of astronomy in northern Europe in the 1540s-strongly suggesting that Koestler's statement about the book was wrong.

After three decades of investigation, and after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles-from Melbourne to Moscow, Boston to Beijing-to view more than 600 copies of De revolutionibus, Gingerich has written an utterly original book built from his experience and the remarkable insights gleaned from Copernicus's books. Eventually he found copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scalawags, by musicians, movie stars, medicine men, and bibliomaniacs. Most interesting were the copies owned and annotated by astronomers, which even today illuminate the long, reluctant process of accepting the sun-centered cosmos as a physically real description of the world, and the tensions among scientists and between science and the church. Part biography of a book and a man, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic quest, Gingerich's book will offer new appreciation of the history of science and cosmology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #327105 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 306 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus, astronomer and "Catholic canon at the Frauenburg [Poland] cathedral," published De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), one of the world's greatest and most revolutionary scientific works, explaining that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the reverse. Yet many have wondered if this dense and very technical book was actually read by the author's contemporaries. Arthur Koestler, in his bestselling history of astronomy, The Sleepwalkers, called it "the book that nobody read." Gingerich, a Harvard astrophysicist and historian of science, proves Koestler wrong. Gingerich went on a quest to track down every extant copy of the original work, and he does a fabulous job of documenting virtually everything there is to know about its first and second (1566) editions, conclusively demonstrating the impact it had on early astronomical thought. As thoroughly engaging as a good detective story, the book recreates the excitement Gingerich himself felt as he traveled the world examining and making sense of centuries-old manuscripts. There is a rich discussion of techniques for assessing treasures of this sort. Handwriting analysis of marginalia, for example, enabled Gingerich to determine who owned many of the copies and to document how critical new ideas spread across Europe and beyond, while an examination of watermarks and glue helps demonstrate whether books have been altered. Providing great insight into 16th-century science, the book should be equally enjoyed by readers interested in the history of science and in bibliophilia. 8 color, 35 b&w illus.
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From Scientific American
In a 1959 best-selling history of astronomy, Arthur Koestler called Copernicus's De revolutionibus (which set forth the controversial view that the sun rather than the earth is at the center of the universe) "the book that nobody read." Gingerich, then an astrophysicist at Harvard University, happened on a first edition from 1543 richly annotated by a well-known 16th-century astronomer. At least one person had read the book! His fascination with this find turned Gingerich into a full-time historian of science and, to prove Koestler wrong, sent him on a 30-year odyssey to examine every first edition he could track down. This is the story of that quest, in which Gingerich covered hundreds of thousands of miles, uncovered 276 first editions and showed that Koestler was, indeed, wrong. The marginal notes, especially in copies that had belonged to other astronomers, reveal how much Copernicus's thesis was being debated by his contemporaries. Part detective thriller, part vivid historical biography, it's all fun.

Editors of Scientific American

From The Washington Post

Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard. From his new book -- an account of his decades-long quest to examine every copy in existence of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, the world-shaking, heavens-altering demonstration that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa -- we also learn that he knows Latin, French and German, and probably some Polish since he spends a fair amount of time in Cracow and Warsaw. He's constantly winging his way off on some all-expenses-paid trip to England, Scotland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Russia or Egypt. He purchases rare 16th-century books at auction -- and then discovers even rarer ones bound in with the already choice item. In fact, no matter where he goes, Gingerich is always making some dramatic textual discovery, proving or disproving provenances, deciphering fuzzy handwriting, destroying other scholars' theories. Throughout The Book That Nobody Read he leaves us in no doubt that when it comes to the history of Renaissance astronomy, Prof. Owen Gingerich is the man.

Which he probably is. But The Book Nobody Read will irritate at least some readers by its pervasive self-congratulatory tone. In real life Gingerich may be a second Francis of Assisi, but in these pages he presents himself, willy-nilly, as yet another of those pampered and indulged Harvard hotshots. At times he even sounds like the supercilious detective Philo Vance (who, as Ogden Nash observed, needs a "kick in the pance"): "Because I was then in my spare time computing planetary positions from ancient Babylonian times to the present, I figured I could easily help him test his hypothesis." Right. This lordly manner crops up in asides, footnotes and personal details: "I assumed that everyone knew what offsetting was. . . . Very quickly I realized that Umiastowski had inserted eight Tychonic leaves to make his first edition complete; in fact, the leaves were not from a first edition at all but from a second. . . . Eventually, I had an opportunity to mention this" -- that a Russian-held copy of a certain book was stolen from East Germany -- "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."

The Book That Nobody Read takes up a somewhat rarefied topic. It's not quite a précis of Renaissance astronomical theory, nor is it a potted biography of Copernicus and his readers, among them such notables as Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Galileo. At heart it's nothing less than a scholarly memoir of Gingerich's encounters with more than 600 first and second editions of De Revolutionibus and his attempts to understand how the book had been understood during the 16th century. Arthur Koestler had claimed that nobody actually read Copernicus, essentially because his treatise was so mathematically arcane. To prove or disprove this assertion, Gingerich examines all the extant copies and shows, through detective work going back to the early 1970s, that De Revolutionibus was actually widely available to the scientific community, that copies were heavily annotated, and that they passed from teacher to disciple all around Europe.

Such a story will naturally appeal to those who enjoy "books about books" or the kind of memoir that traces the personal drama behind some scientific or literary breakthrough. The progenitor of this sort of biographical study is The Quest for Corvo, in which A.J.A. Symons describes the course of his investigations as he tries to unearth details about the secret life of a minor late-19th-century author (one best known for his skillful invective and a single good novel, Hadrian VII). More recently, James Watson's The Double Helix chronicled the back-stage give-and-take behind the discovery of the structure of DNA. But such books only work if the result is either immensely quirky and charming (Symons) or replete with drama and revelations (Watson). The Book Nobody Read misses because Gingerich's personality isn't particularly winning and what he has to say is at once highly bibliographical and the point proven less than earth-shattering.

Though Gingerich writes clearly enough when relating his visits to libraries, museums and universities, he is likely to leave the unmathematical at a loss when he defines an astronomical detail: "Second, [Ptolemy] had to figure out a way to make the epicycle move around the eccentric (deferent) circle more slowly on the side where the loops didn't come as close to the Earth, and here he invented a very ingenious device called the equant." Admittedly, numbers and formulae are always going to distress the casual reader (like musical examples in the brilliant books of Charles Rosen or untranslated Latin or Greek in works of classical scholarship). But if you think you can just skip over the equant, guess again: "My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts."

Indeed, it comes as something of a shock that many readers at first took Copernicus's heliocentric arrangement of our part of the cosmos as simply a better, simpler way to calculate planetary positions. Demonstrating that it was also literally, and not just heuristically, true required further evidence, largely provided by Kepler and his proof of the elliptical nature of planetary orbits.

In the end, Gingerich's census of Copernicus's great work cannot fail to leave one impressed by the man's energy -- he totes his camera and flood lights everywhere -- and by his historical acumen. Scholars, of course, don't need to be anything but smart -- even as books really just need to be enchanting.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

An introduction to bibliophilia
The story of Copernicus and his description of the heliocentric universe forms the background of this fascinating book. The scientific revolution began with Copernicus. Owen Gingerich is an astrophysicist and historian of science who began his whimsical quest in 1970 as part of the preparation for the 500th anniversary of Copernicus birth in 1973. International scholarly celebrations were planned and Gingerich was on the committee to prepare them. The question arose whether many owners of the book had actually read all the way through this massive and rather tedious tome. Gingerich happened to be visiting Scotland at the time and decided to look at a copy of "De revolutionibus," known to be in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. To his surprise, the copy was heavily annotated all the way through. It had been very carefully read by someone. The reader had even corrected a number of errors in the text. Gingerich searched for evidence of the reader's name. Finally, he discovered the initials ER stamped on the cover. With a shock, he realized that these might be the initials of Erasmus Reinhold, the leading mathematical astronomer of the generation after Copernicus. Gingerich eventually found samples of Reinhold's writing and confirmed his hypothesis. For the next 30 years, he searched for other copies of the great work and recorded the annotations placed in the margins by owners during the Renaissance. He became an expert on Copernicus and the sociology of science in the 15th and following centuries. He also became an expert on paper-making, printing and binding. This resulted in several detective stories as book thieves and forgers were uncovered and prosecuted. I found the details of the book-making science nearly as interesting as the main story and have ordered books on early printing and paper making. This is a book for those interested in history and in astronomy. Occasionally the details get to be slow going but these spots are few and the story moves along well. If you are interested in the history of the Renaissance, this will fill in places missing in most political histories. It is excellent writing and excellent history.

A fascinating mix of history, science, and bibliomania
It's remarkable that a complicated science book published more than 460 years ago could come alive in the pages of a new book, but that's the case in The Book Nobody Read-the story of astronomer Owen Gingerich's 30-year quest to see in person every existing copy of Nicolaus Copernicus's revolutionary 1543 book De revolutionibus, which for the first time suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe.

Gingerich found copies originally owned by Galileo, Kepler, and a host of important figures in the 16th century, many of them annotated-and in those annotations he found fascinating information about the debate between scientists and the Catholic Church over the true state of the universe, and about how knowledge spread in the 16th century. Along the way he shows us how he found the books (all over the world, from Beijing and Melbourne to Europe, Scandinavia, and America); takes us to the trial of a man accused of stealing a copy (Gingerich was the expert witness for the prosecution) and to a dramatic auction of another copy (he often consults to auction houses); offers intriguing details on how Copernicus's massive book was printed and speculates on how many copies would have been printed; and perhaps most interestingly, weaves into his story those of 16th- and 17th-century scientific intellectuals whose insights are cornerstones of our knowledge today.

Book jackets often overstate a book's significance, but the last paragraph of this jacket description seems very accurate: "Part biography of a book, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic detective story, The Book Nobody Read recolors the history of cosmology and offers new appreciation of the enduring power of an extraordinary book and its ideas." This is one of the smartest books I've read in a long time.

First Class Detective Story
First Class Detective Story

The author chronicles his 30 year search for fate of the original copies of the Copernicus's revolutionary text. This makes for a first rate detective story. The book is as hard to put down as any good mystery.

Gingerich shows that the history of astronomy is interwoven with the entire history of mankind.

See Also:

The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

and

God's Universe

Highly recommended.