The Book Nobody Read
Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
Arthur Koestler called Copernicus’s De revolutionibus the book nobody read. Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and historian at Harvard, set out to find whether that was true, and spent thirty years tracking down every surviving sixteenth-century copy he could reach. That came to more than six hundred, in libraries from Uppsala to Beijing, including copies stolen, recovered, and traced through auction records. The marginalia told him the book had not merely been read but worked through by the astronomers of its day. The result is part census, part detective story, and part argument about how a revolution actually spreads.
Recommended by 1 Person
Dava Sobel
What is interesting about Gingerich's book is that he writes about his own study of On the Revolution. Over a period of 30 years, wherever he travelled he sought out all the extant copies of it, examining more than 600 surviving copies from the 16th century, and while he was doing that he noticed that the book hadn't only been read but properly studied. He knew this because the margins of the copies were full of notes. So he was able to prove that it was, in fact, an extremely important book.
Interview · April 2012
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