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 Historical
The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions
of Nicolaus Copernicus
 by Owen Gingerich
$15 / Penguin Books / 2004
The so-called "book nobody
read" was Copernicus' 1543 work On the Revolutions of
the Heavenly Spheres, in which the Polish astronomer expressed,
for the first time, that the sun and not the earth was the center
of the universe.
For a work of this nature, this book by Harvard Smithsonian professor
Owen Gingerich takes a different approach from most. Unlike previous
histories written about Copernicus, Gingerich focuses more on
locating copies of Copernicus' book than in examining the ideas
in it.
Arthur Koestler's influential 1959 history of astronomy The
Sleepwalkers, presented a view that Copernicus' book was
not nearly so widely read as many other books on astronomy of
the day, due to its extreme unreadability. Ultimately, Koestler's
work inspired Gingerich to locate and survey almost every known
edition of On the Revolutions, a 30-year obsession which
led Gingerich not only to Europe and some Warsaw Pact nations
but also to Australia and China. During his travels, he served
as an expert witness at a trial of a man who had stolen a copy
of Copernicus' book; braved the Byzantine procedures in the rare
book archives of Cold War Russia; and attended a rare books auction
in which, in less than three minutes, a first edition of On
the Revolutions sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for
$675,000.
In the end, Gingerich located 600 copies of On the Revolutions,
documenting who had owned them and the comments they had
written in them. Most important were the copies owned by astronomers,
which demonstrated a long-time acceptance of the Suncentered
cosmos. Finally, Gingerich concludes that Koestler was completely
wrong about the negligible influence of On the Revolutions.
Although Gingerich's tracking of the centuries-old copies of
Copernicus' work through the dusty archives of history may not
be for everyone, anyone who finds it interesting to peer over
the shoulders of those who had the courage to defy the entrenched
orthodoxy of the day and to write about the heavens as they observed
them, will find this book second to none.
—Ron Hunka
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