JERZY DOBRZYCKI'S dry sense of humor always enlivened my visits to Warsaw. He had a stoic attitude of realism about coping with conditions there, which meant long hours of standing in lines. Even that sometimes had its ironically funny moments. The Staszy Palace, home of the History of Science Institute, was a hotbed for the Solidarity movement, and there came a time when the entire building was placed under siege by the military and its occupants were arrested. Jerzy and his colleague Paul Czarto-ryski, who edited the series of Copernican studies and the Complete Works, were so busy at work that they didn't want to leave immediately. "You must come," said the departmental secretary, Olga. "This is what Solidarity means; we're all in this together." So at last Dobrzycki and Czartoryski went down to the front portico of the palace, only to be faced with a long line of workers waiting to be arrested and a large crowd of curious onlookers. As they paused, wondering what to do, a policeman came by and suggested they get lost. And so they did, melting seamlessly into the crowd.
But in August of 1973 those events were still some years in the future, and Poland bubbled over with a well-developed Copernican euphoria. The quinquecentennial celebrations were in full swing, colorful Copernican posters were everywhere, wooden plates with the astronomer's portrait were found in every kiosk, and international visitors were coming to trace the footsteps of Copernicus. Included were scientists from around the globe, assembling in Warsaw to pay homage to their illustrious forebear.
Of course I had told Dobrzycki what I had found at the Vatican Library before giving my IAU invited discourse, but he was still chagrined that he had passed over the volume when he had first seen it in Rome. Nevertheless, he continued to back my census with full enthusiasm. We went together to his hometown of Poznan to see the six De revolutionibus copies in the libraries there, and then to Wroclaw, where there were two important collections, one at the university and the other at the Ossolin-ski, an independent institution that had transferred from the vicinity of Kiev just after World War II. Dobrzycki showed me the printed catalog of the Ossolinski books, and I noticed that for every entry there was an ordered list of all the provenances, that is, all previous ownerships and locations. This arrangement seemed like an ideal approach for the type of extensive survey that I had undertaken, although it also meant that much of the information I had collected wasn't fully adequate.
Dobrzycki agreed on both counts. Clearly, the census was undergoing a significant metamorphosis. It would not simply be a matter of checking whether the copies were annotated. Not only would I redouble my efforts to inspect nearly all of the first and second editions, but I would need to be more systematic in collecting background information on each copy so that where possible I could track who had owned it over the centuries. So, a few years into the survey, I realized that I would have to go back to many of the libraries to make sure that my notes were complete enough. This meant returning to Cambridge, Oxford, and London to ensure that I had the provenances of several dozen books.
I'm often asked how I found where the copies are. If you live in Europe or North America and want to see just one copy, that's easy.* There are several primary reference resources to track one down. Today the OCLC (On-line Computer Library Center) or the KVK (Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog) gives immediate on-line assistance. When I began, the NUC (National Union Catalog), a magnificent reference work of 400 volumes, provided a starting point, though one always has to be on guard against several twentieth-century facsimiles being mistaken for the original.* But the NUC listed only about one-third of the forty-some copies of the first edition in North America and of the slightly greater number of second editions, so if you want to see all the copies, you have to use additional tactics. One of the principal ways to find other copies is to write letters of inquiry to old or large libraries. Another is to ask specialist book dealers. At any one time there are worldwide scarcely two dozen firms with serious inventories of rare science books, and I contacted them all. One of the most helpful dealers was Jake Zeitlin, a major figure in the cultural life of southern California. Zeitlin was very forthcoming in helping me locate books in private collections. He had, for example, sold a copy to a distinguished medical doctor who had subsequently grown senile, but he was determined that I should see it. He took me to the doctor's mansion, and we waited till the nurse had wheeled the collector out to the swimming pool before we made our surreptitious entry into the library. The copy had no annotations, so it was a quick job to measure it (one of the largest copies in existence because the binder had trimmed very little of the rough edge of the paper) and to document its binding without its owner having the slightest inkling of the intellectual burglary being pulled off inside.
I was particularly keen to see the Liege copy that Robert Westman had surprised me with at the 1974 History of Science Society meeting, and I got my chance soon after that session in Norwalk, on my way back from one of my periodic inspection visits to Cairo. I stopped off in Brussels and drove to Liege, bringing along my suitcase of photoflood lamps in order to make some slides of the book.† To see for myself the complexities of these annotations was an exhilarating experience. The Liege volume had two layers of handwriting: an early hand that had simply copied Reinhold's annotations, and an overlay of notes by Tycho Brahe. But the early hand included some material that was very likely from Reinhold yet was no longer found in the Edinburgh De revolutionibus, and it was precisely the material on these pages that had triggered the entire sequence of planetary orbits in the well-annotated Ottoboniana 1902 in the Vatican. The plot was thickening, but it would be some time before Westman and I could sit down together to come to terms with the Tychonic material.
Meanwhile, I worked assiduously to examine other, far-flung copies, taking advantage of European conferences or my annual trips to Cairo to visit libraries throughout the United Kingdom and the Continent. In those days it was difficult to see the forest for the trees; the fascinating connections between many of the volumes became apparent solely in retrospect. For example, I realized only gradually what an extraordinary collection of copies survives in Scotland. In Edinburgh alone there are half a dozen copies. Besides the seminal exemplar annotated by Erasmus Reinhold, there is one owned by Adam Smith, the economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations and who alluded to De revolutionibus in his essay on the history of astronomy. The copy won three stars in the Census, not because of Smith's ownership but on account of an earlier and still-unidentified owner from the Wittenberg circle, who had written, "Anyone can rightly wonder how from such absurd hypotheses of Copernicus, which conflict with universal agreement and reason, such an accurate calculation can be produced, and why he did not undertake the correcting of the Ptolemaic hypotheses, which agree with Sacred Scripture and experience, rather than producing such a paradox." The description of this copy, with its anonymous defense of Copernicus, takes five pages in the Census, and I would gladly offer a champagne dinner to anyone who can establish who the annotator was.
There was yet another well-annotated copy in Edinburgh, owned by the physician John Craig. This book would later play a key role in untangling the Tychonic annotations and would unexpectedly confirm a hoary rumor about the invention of logarithms. In Glasgow I found three first editions, but not until the final days of assembling the camera-ready copy for my Census, decades later, would I xzdvzt that one of them had a particularly remarkable provenance. In Aberdeen the librarians simply locked me in the rare book stacks, so I had a marvelous opportunity to see the range of sixteenth-century astronomy books brought back to Scotland by Duncan Liddel, who had taught astronomy in various universities on the Continent in the 1580s and 1590s. His second-edition De revolutionibus was clearly a three-star copy, for it contained on interleaved pages the third known sixteenth-century copy of Copernicus' Commentariolus, the one identified by Jerzy Dobrzycki; but more than that, the marginalia in this copy would eventually connect with the Tycho story.
At St. Andrews (perhaps more famous for its golf course than for its university) there was a first edition that had once belonged to a "German nation"—one of the Renaissance university student guilds or unions for German-speaking students. The entire slate of officers was duly inscribed on the flyleaf. Unlike many of the copies in the British libraries, this one had not been acquired until the nineteenth century, as an antiquarian item, so its earlier provenance was quite obscure.*
IN CONTRAST to the richly annotated copies of Scotland, those in the French provinces seemed like a barren intellectual wilderness superimposed on an inviting touristic landscape. Yet ultimately, the very sparsity of annotations, and in particular, the lack of censorship demanded by the Roman Inquisition in 1620, yielded one of the unexpected and most interesting insights of the project.
In the summer of 1976 the International Astronomical Union met at Grenoble in southern France, giving an occasion for one of several campaigns to visit a number of libraries scattered around the country. Two investigations had enabled me to locate these copies. The first I undertook at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Its reference section contains printed catalogs of numerous provincial libraries; these volumes seem unique to France and are a monument to the Gallic penchant for systematization. Arranged by a rigorous subject classification, they could be swiftly checked for Copernicus' book, and I surveyed dozens of them with a comparatively modest investment of time. The second net was cast by Rene Taton, dean of the French historians of science, and Maylis Cazenave; they advertised in a journal read by French librarians, and they wrote letters to likely libraries. Between these two surveys, we located seventeen first editions and sixteen second editions in the French provinces, which rather astonished most of my Parisian friends, who like to think that a majority of the important treasures have long since been centralized in the capital.* In any event, these lists served as a good guide for scholarly tourism in the French outback.
Following the astronomical sessions in Grenoble, Jerzy Dobrzycki (who by then had succeeded me as chairman of the IAU's History of Astronomy Commission) went with Miriam and me to nearby Vienne. We admired the Temple of Augustus, an antiquity from Roman times and Vienne's two-star wonder in the Guide Michelin, but our goal was the Bibliotheque Municipal, which turned out to be a matchbox-sized library facing a nearby square. Its first edition had only minor annotations, but it bore a splendid signature on the title page: Pontus de Tyard, a key French author of the sixteenth century. Pontus belonged to the Pleiades, a coterie of seven young men who exercised a formative influence on their native language; their purpose was to encourage the writing of French as against Latin, and to enrich the literary language with appropriations from classical Latin and Greek. Pontus wrote sonnets as well as a wide-ranging discourse on the parts and nature of the world entitled L'Univers (1557), which gave several laudatory references to Copernicus, and he even authored a technical and now extremely rare Ephemerides octavae sphaerae. With his copy of De revolutionibus in hand in the library, I coveted a slide of the title page with his autograph, and looked around for a window with enough light for my Nikon. In the absence of a suitable window, the librarian suggested that I simply take the book out into the square in front of the library. I've always regretted that I didn't have Miriam snap a picture of Jerzy and me examining the book on the front steps of the Biblio-theque Municipal in Vienne.
That afternoon we drove south to Lyons; Miriam and I soon found the public library, a handsome building in a brand-new shopping mall, which contained two nonmemorable first editions. Rush-hour traffic impeded our departure, so we made slow headway to our next destination, Clermont-Ferrand. The next morning we found the library in Clermont-Ferrand by 11 A.M.—leaving very little time to inspect the De revolutionibus before its 11:30 closing. There was a bit of a flap finding the book, as it turned out to have already been fetched and placed on reserve for me. Since it wasn't annotated, recording its size, binding, and condition for the census was easy. Like most of the books, it did include early ownership inscriptions, so I could see that it had been in a Carmelite convent in Clermont already in the seventeenth century. Clermont—Blaise Pascal's hometown—lies on the slope of Puy de Dome, the extinct volcanic peak where in 1648 Pascal had carried a primitive barometer to demonstrate how the weight of the Earth's atmosphere balanced the mercury in the tube of the barometer. We drove to the top, only to find it wreathed in thick fog; not until we were leaving town did the clouds lift long enough for us to glimpse its summit.
That evening we made it to Bourges, got a hotel with bath and breakfast for fourteen dollars, and prepared for our visit to its library the next day, Saturday. Again, there were no annotations, so we hastened on to Troyes, where two more lightly annotated copies were available—wondrous to report—on a Saturday afternoon.
This 1976 field trip was typical of many that crisscrossed Europe and which enabled me to inspect personally nearly every locatable copy. The successive European campaigns yielded a kaleidoscopic view of De revolutionibus, some memorable, some hopelessly nonmemorable but in memorable libraries, and some merely faded blurs of memories. The journey from Grenoble to Vienne and north to Paris, for example, demonstrated that libraries throughout the land had acquired Copernicus' book early on—De revolutionibus was clearly perceived as a work that any serious collection required. The copies in Lyons, Clermont-Ferrand, and Bourges had all been owned by clerical libraries, and not one had seen the censor's hand, even in a Catholic country. Thus, despite the absence of annotations, a significant pattern was beginning to emerge.
THE SUMMER OF 1977 brought a change of pace to the Copernican research. Six years had elapsed since my Copernicus quest had begun, and another sabbatical year in Europe was about to begin. For the first semester I was a visiting fellow at St. Edmund's House in Cambridge. Once a virtual monastery for Catholic male students, it had become quite ecumenical. Miriam, our youngest son, Peter, and I settled down in a maisonette on St. Edmund's grounds. Not many miles away, Robert Westman had taken up residence as he, too, was taking a sabbatical year and had likewise chosen Cambridge for its venue. Although we were working on several independent projects, we periodically got together at the Observatories, where I had both an office and the loan of a microfilm reader. Meanwhile, I continued my pursuit of still more copies of De revolutionibus.
It was well known in history of science circles that one of the most important collections of scientific manuscripts from the time of Isaac Newton was locked away in Shirburn Castle, the Earl of Macclesfield's residence near Oxford. In the eighteenth century the 3rd Earl had been a devotee of astronomy, and one of the principal backers of calendar reform in the House of Lords when England and its colonies (including America) finally accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. His assistant, William Jones, had been a tireless collector of books and manuscripts, which had gone to the Earl after Jones' death in 1749. In 1896 the grandson of the 6th Earl had inherited the title while a mere child, and, as the 7th Earl, had lived to an old age. This posed a formidable problem to historians of science throughout most of the twentieth century because the 7th Lord Macclesfield had fended off historians. It was only by a special concession that the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific organization, had been allowed to copy the rich repository of Isaac Newton letters in the collection in order to complete its magisterial seven-volume edition of Newton's correspondence.*
I suspected early on that Shirburn Castle was a likely site for a copy of Copernicus' book, but I assumed access would be next to impossible. One day a colleague remarked that the newly titled 8th Earl of Macclesfield might prove a little more amenable to showing his treasures. After the 7th Earl had died in 1975, the Inland Revenue office had struck an agreement as part of the death duties settlement to the effect that the collection was supposed to become more easily available to qualified scholars, but this agreement was apparently a well-kept secret. My colleague suggested that if Lord Macclesfield had a De revolutionibus, he might be willing to deposit it in the Oxfordshire Public Records Office for a few days so that I could examine it. Armed with this fresh intelligence, I asked my office in the States to send a letter of inquiry. By return post came the answer: Both the first and second editions were in the collection, and I was instructed to phone the earl. It took a few days for me to gather the courage to place the call. When I asked him if he would deposit the volumes in the Oxfordshire Public Records Office for me to inspect, he surprised me by inviting Miriam and me to Shirburn. At his suggestion we settled for the following Thursday.
As castles go, Shirburn is not pretentious, but it wins high honors for its bucolic charm and for the moat that completely surrounds it. We entered on the side via a small permanent bridge. "How nice of you to come on Thursday," Lady Macclesfield said. "This is the only day we have a cook, and we can invite you for lunch."
We were ushered into a drawing room decorated by two large paintings of horses on each of the four walls. I straightaway recognized the eight Shirburn canvases as the work of George Stubbs, a fashionable English painter of the eighteenth century. Lady Macclesfield led Miriam away for a tour of the castle, which included cranking down the main drawbridge, while Lord Macclesfield and I turned to the two copies of De revolutionibus, which he had brought down from the library for me.*
Of the two, the first edition turned out to contain some unexpected annotations, quite unconnected with Copernicus' text. The copy had formerly belonged to John Greaves, an early-seventeenth-century professor of astronomy at Oxford and a pioneering scholar in Islamic scientific texts. Greaves apparently acquired his exemplar in Italy while en route to the Holy Land, and its endpapers became a convenient notebook when he visited Aleppo in Syria. There he had the opportunity to copy some remarks from an earlier traveler who had gone overland to the Mogul court in India, and who had recorded in his diary that he had "observed two unicorns with his own eyes." Lord Macclesfield had never had occasion to notice the inscription before and was quite amused when I read it to him. Only much later, after my Census was published, did I learn that the traveler who had seen the unicorns in Lahore was Thomas Coryate, a notable seventeenth-century English traveler whose published diary included a fanciful woodblock of the mythical beast.
Greaves was one of the few scholars to use a pencil rather than a pen when he annotated the text itself, particularly the mathematical sections. On the otherwise blank leaves inside the front cover he had included numerous small diagrams and rules for spherical trigonometry, as well as correlations of chronologies, partly in Arabic and Persian. In contrast, the second edition, which had been owned by an early English mathematician appropriately named Euclid Speidell, was unannotated apart from the owner's name. That turned out to be fairly typical: Of the fifteen copies of the first or second edition in Oxford, nine were essentially unannotated apart from ownership marks.
The unicorn from Thomas Coryate's travels to India in 1616. That the woodblock is trimmed suggests it was recycled froman earlier book
BOB WESTMAN had joined me at the Cambridge Observatories for one of our joint research sessions. As a warm-up exercise, we threaded into the viewer a microfilm of De revolutionibus that I had ordered from the University Library in Wroclaw, Poland. The neat and extensive annotations grabbed our attention at once. As an inscription on the title page revealed, they had been made around 1600 by one Valentin von Sebisch, a city councillor at Liegnitz in Poland, but a nobody as far as astronomy was concerned. This fact in itself puzzled us, but there was another problem.
The annotations were just too neat, without the cross-outs or interlinear interpolations so characteristic of working notes, and they were too perceptive. Sebisch, for example, pointed out that one of Copernicus' purported observations exactly matched the calculated position from the venerable Alfonsine Tables. But then something really took us by surprise: We suddenly realized that Sebisch's marginal drawing and part of the annotation on folio 113 agreed closely with Tycho's notes on the same page of his Prague copy. Our discovery explained at once why Sebisch had seemed too clever for a nobody and too error-free in drafting his notes. His annotations were surely just a straight copy from Tycho Brahe.
We had conquered one mystery, but a bigger dragon rose out of this solution. Sebisch's notes matched Tycho's copies here and there; they were obviously from the same family, but just as clearly they seemed to stem from a Tychonic copy we had not identified. Between the two of us, we had canvassed the major universities and libraries well enough to know that the chances of finding a fourth copy from Tycho were pretty low—and yet we found it within six weeks!
My earlier search of the auction records had left a couple of loose ends, one old and one new. First, the new one: Several recently auctioned copies had been knocked down* to a buyer named Umiastowski, whose English address was unknown to me. My Polish colleagues identified him as the colonel who, at the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, had gone on the radio to urge every able-bodied man to the front, and had thereby created the most monumental traffic jam yet known in Warsaw. The old loose end was that in 1912 and 1913 Christie's in London had auctioned first editions, but I had been able to trace only one of them. So I asked Christie's if I could look at their old records in search of clues to help identify the unlocated book.
In the workroom at Christie's I soon found the answer to the older problem. The 1912 and 1913 copies were one and the same. For the first sale, the description "with marginal notes and annotations" had been deemed inadequate by the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch (who had won the De revolutionibus with a bid of twenty-two pounds), so the book was returned because the auction catalog hadn't indicated that folios 38 and 39 were in an old calligraphic facsimile, and not the original printed leaves. Christie's corrected the description by specifically mentioning that two leaves were supplied in manuscript, and put it on the block once more, four months later. Quaritch again purchased it, but this time for much less. My subsequent researches revealed that Quaritches still had the book after World War I, and in 1925 they were offering it for twenty-five pounds. Six years later, despite the stock market crash, the London firm of Henry Sotheran had it, priced at seventy-five pounds.*
Valentin Sebisch's marginal annotations in De revolutionibus (left), neatlycopied from the original set made by Paul Wittich (right). Both copies are now in the Wroclaw University library.
As I was zeroing in on the identification of the ghost copy, the telephone rang. A Christie's staff member held a brief conversation, hung up, and turned to a colleague to ask, "Do you know anyone named Umi-astowski?"
His coworker merely shrugged, but I leapt to attention. When I discovered that Umiastowski was in the waiting room, since the person he wanted to see wasn't in yet, I rushed downstairs and quickly guessed who was the expatriate Polish colonel. I introduced myself and launched into a conversation about his famous countryman. Umiastowski warmed to the subject and expansively claimed to have four copies of Copernicus' book. Before the conversation was over, I had got his address and an invitation to come and see his books in Dulwich in the near future.
By mid-December 1977 I had made the arrangements to visit the eighty-six-year-old colonel. Roman Umiastowski began by showing me his first edition—a "complete" copy, he proudly announced. I was quite puzzled and not a little suspicious since the book had been auctioned rather cheaply a few years earlier as imperfect, lacking eight leaves. As I paged through it, I was thrilled to recognize that its marginalia matched an extensive set I had seen in Toronto. I was slowly coming to realize that major annotations seldom come singly; before my eyes a new family of annotations was emerging.
I turned another page and was stopped cold in my tracks. The marginal handwriting totally changed, but what arrested my attention was the fact that this second hand was Tycho's! By that time I was so familiar with his distinctive writing that I could be quite sure, yet for a moment nothing made any sense. I paged on, and eight leaves later the first handwriting reappeared. 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.
I didn't have to look far to see the source of the eight Tychonic leaves. Stacked on the far side of the table were the folios from a broken De revolutionibus. Besides the broken Tychonic copy, there were two more second editions as well as the first. Umiastowski's great joy was to make books complete, and having bought several imperfect copies, he was in the process of disassembling one of them to make other incomplete copies complete. The problem was, Umiastowski was cutting up what was obviously the most important second edition in private hands in order to repair the others. It was theater of the absurd. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
As diplomatically as I could, I explained the importance of the annotations to the colonel. Umiastowski looked very sad and allowed that he had just brought his "complete" copy back from the bindery the previous week. Before I left, he had agreed to reassemble the Tychonic copy and to allow me to return to make a microfilm of it. I could hardly wait to get back to Cambridge to recount my adventure to Bob Westman. We were both almost incredulous at the idea that I had so promptly found the original notes from which Sebisch had copied. By January I had made my microfilm, and we began to pore over the annotations. But Bob was increasingly troubled, and he recalled his original doubts about the handwriting.
"There's something wrong," he asserted. "Why would Tycho Brahe, who was so industriously building instruments on his island of Hven, and so busy making observations, take time to annotate four separate copies of De revolutionibus? At the very least he must have used an amanuensis."
I objected, saying that if the copies were all alike, of course a secretary could have copied the notes, but these copies were each different. And you don't tell your secretary to write in the margin, "I don't understand this theorem." Such a note had to be written by the astronomer himself. But I agreed with Bob that we had to check the handwriting to make sure it really was Tycho's. We knew that the great bulk of Tychonic manuscripts were in the manuscript collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. I remembered I had some Vienna photocopies back in my office in the States, but we were in a hurry. Then I recalled that sometime in the nineteenth century one of the Czech scholars had produced a facsimile of a trigonometry manuscript in Tycho's hand. The next day, I found it in the Cambridge University Library. Titled Triangulorum planorum et sphaericorum praxis, it was printed in Prague in 1886.
The trigonometric manual turned out to be quite problematic. The agreement between the handwriting in the old Prague facsimile and in the annotated copies of De revolutionibus was not very convincing and left a cloud of ambiguity over the whole project. Bob was convinced there was something fishy about the Prague document, and pretty soon he retrieved more information about it in the multivolume Tychonis Brahe Opera Om-nia, the modern edition prepared early in the twentieth century by the astronomical historian J. L. E. Dreyer. Dreyer was highly critical of the claims made for the Prague trigonometry manual. It couldn't be in Tycho's hand, he declared; Tycho never made a two-stroke capital M like those in the Triangulorum planorum and also, disconcertingly, like those in the annotations in our four "Tycho Brahe" Copernicus volumes.
Had we been deceiving ourselves for four years? Was it possible that Tycho wasn't, after all, the author of those interesting planetary diagrams in the Vatican?
I put in a phone call to my office in the United States, requesting that my photocopies of some of the Viennese Tycho materials be rushed to me at once. About a week later the sheets arrived. Bob and I eagerly compared them with the microfilms of the Copernican annotations. It did not take long to realize that we were in trouble. The handwritings did not match at all.
The moment of truth had arrived. We had been chasing the wrong scent. Tycho Brahe could not possibly have annotated those four copies of De revolutionibus. As Kepler said when one of his ideas collapsed, "The hypothesis has gone up in smoke."
* But if you live in Cape Town, the nearest first edition is about 6,000 miles north, in Naples. From Buenos Aires it is about the same distance to Guadalajara, Mexico. From Sydney the nearest first edition is in Manila, nearly 5,000 miles north. From Delhi it is almost an equidistant 4,000 miles to first editions in Moscow, Manila, or Hiroshima.
* Facsimile editions of the 1543 first edition were published in 1928 (Paris), 1943 (Amsterdam and Turin), 1960 (Leipzig), and 1966 (Brussels), and a CD Rom in 1999 (Los Altos). A facsimile was also made of the 1566 second edition in 1972 (Prague).
† One of my most distinct memories of this trip is the fact that Liege was the only place where I have ever found 165 volts in the electric lines. I traveled with photoflood bulbs for the standard European 220 volts, so I was temporarily stymied, but presently the astfonomers produced a transformer and I was in business.
* Quite by chance I discovered in which university town the "German nation" of the St. Andrews copy was actually located. While in Padua, as I was looking at an exhibition marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo's professorship there (in 1592), I noticed in a display case the same roster of names in one of the exhibited books; a further investigation disclosed that they were all among the foreign students at Padua in the early 1600s. There are a dozen first editions in Paris, and a baker's dozen of the second.
* In 2001 Cambridge University Library acquired the collection of letters for £6.37 million.
* Over lunch the Macclesfields explained that Shirburn was one of only three or four buildings in England that still retained a working moat on all four sides, and that cinema companies frequently asked to rent the castle. But Lord and Lady Macclesfield considered this to be too much of a nuisance since the movie moguls would wish to pull down the anachronistic rain gutters. Lady Macclesfield also remarked that they had occasionally thought about opening the casde to the public on Sunday afternoons, for besides the paintings it included many historical curiosities such as Queen Elizabeth I's riding gloves. Unfortunately, they noted, the flow pattern was not conducive to large groups, so nothing ever came of that. As far as I know, Miriam is the only person in history of science circles who has had the tour.
* When the auctioneer taps his or her hammer to indicate that the bidding is over, the item is said to have been knocked down.
* The copy could well have accidentally come incomplete from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and rather than return it, an original owner may have made the manuscript facsimile of the missing signature. The fact that this copy was imperfect accounts for its later wandering. It was much less expensive than a perfect copy and thus affordable by an English mathematics professor who taught for over a decade at Iowa State Univetsity. Apparently, he sold it around 1937 when he returned to England, and it was bought by Yale University. Eventually, a Yale benefactor offered to exchange this one for a perfect copy (the most important first edition in America, described in the previous chapter), and in 1971 this benefactor gave the imperfect copy to Stanford University. When Stanford subsequently acquired a perfect copy, I realized that this one might be released as a duplicate. I knew that the staff in charge of special collections at San Diego State University greatly coveted a copy, but the library could not afford the astronomical price to which a perfect copy had ascended, so I suggested that they negotiate with the Stanford library. In 1991 the library at San Diego State University purchased the imperfect copy as its millionth book acquisition.