TYCHO WAS suspicious of Nicolaus Raimerus Ursus just as soon as he turned up at Uraniborg in September 1584 in the entourage of the nobleman Eric Lange. He suspected Ursus, known colloquially as "the Bear," of snooping around in his library, sniffing private papers. Determined to quench this industrial espionage, Tycho organized affairs so that the Bear got thoroughly drunk, and while he was dozing in an alcoholic stupor, Tycho had him searched. While this turned up no evidence, the lord of Uraniborg castle was still convinced that his closely guarded results were being stolen by an unwelcome guest.
And he had good reasons to worry about what Ursus had been up to, for just as Tycho was printing his own geoheliocentric cosmological system, in 1588, Ursus illustrated a very similar planetary model in a publication of his own. In both systems the Earth was at the center of the cosmos, and in both the Moon and Sun revolved about the fixed Earth, with the Sun carrying the retinue of other planets in orbit about it. However, there was a critical difference. In the Tychonic system, the circle of Mars sliced through the circle of the Sun's annual movement. This is required for Mars to come closer to the Earth than the Sun, as it correctly does in the Copernican system. In Ursus' system this was not the case, and because it always kept Mars farther than the Sun, it failed geometrically. While this error vitiated the Bear's system, it was so similar to Tycho's own proposal that the Dane was thoroughly outraged.
There was another curious feature of Ursus' Fundamentum astronomicum that must have galled Tycho: Ursus dedicated the many geometric diagrams in his book to a veritable who's who of European astronomers. Paul Wittich got a generous two-thirds-page diagram, as did Caspar Peucer and Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin. Christopher Clavius, the leading Italian astronomer, had an even larger one. The biggest of all was the large folding diagram of Ursus' system, dedicated to Tycho's chief rival, Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse. Conspicuous by his absence was Tycho Brahe. Tycho loftily declared that he was grateful not to be dragged into such a miserable book, but it still must have aggravated him to be so obviously snubbed.
The diagram dedicated to Paul Wittich in Nicolaus Raiments Vrsus' Fundamentum astronomicum (Strasbourg, 1588), folio 16 verso, author's collection.
Tycho wreaked his revenge on both Wittich and Ursus when he finally got around to publishing the first volume of his correspondence, where he vigorously defended his own cosmological priority. He attacked Wittich with innuendo, scarcely mentioning the name of his then-deceased onetime visitor. But Ursus, who had meanwhile become imperial mathematician at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, was depicted as a blackguard and plagiarist.
Ursus (who may well have been innocent of plagiarism) was not about to take this character assassination lying down, and he promptly prepared a scurrilous counterattack on the Danish nobleman, drawing attention to Tycho's morganatic marriage* and insinuating that his wife was a whore. As for Tycho's nose, which had been disfigured in a youthful drunken duel, Ursus slyly reported that, although he would never say so himself, one of his merry and witty dinner guests had uproariously reported that Tycho didn't actually need any instruments. He could just tilt his head up and look through his exposed nostril. "Why did he go to the senseless expense of one tool after another? He should be content with his natural nose that Mother Nature had so generously provided him with." And as for the plagiarism charge, Ursus conceded, "Let it be a theft, but a philosophical one." It was a standard rhetorical device: Concede your opponent's charge in order to demonstrate that it wouldn't have made any difference. Ursus claimed that the Tychonic system was so obvious that it was already implied in the ancient Greek work of Apollonius.
Tycho's fury was thus compounded. He brought a lawsuit against the Bear, with the consequence that the great majority of copies of Ursus' tract, De astronomicis hypothesibus, was destroyed. The work is now so rare that when J. L. E. Dreyer was preparing his classic biography of Tycho, he hadn't been able to see a copy (and thus didn't know that it was the bridge of Tycho's nose that had been sliced off in the duel).
As Westman and I were digging out the story of Tycho, Wittich, and Ursus, I had an incredible piece of luck: In the spring of 1986 I accidentally purchased a copy of De astronomicis hypothesibus. For many years I had been systematically collecting old ephemerides, the volumes that tabulated planetary positions on a daily basis. By analyzing the accuracy of those predictions, I could track the general lack of improvement made when the Copernican system replaced the old Ptolemaic system, for example. That was unsurprising, considering that Copernicus' achievement was not something forced by fresh observations, but rather was a triumph of the mind in envisioning what was essentially a more beautiful arrangement of the planets.
For a lover of numbers, these old volumes with their columns of digits have a compelling beauty, but this is essentially an eccentric's view— fortunately for me, because there wasn't much competition in acquiring them. And dealers knew I was the most likely buyer. Thus, when a copy of Michael Maestlin's 1580 Ephemerides came up for sale at the Blooms-bury Auctions in London, Quaritches alerted me and asked if I wanted to bid. However, they warned me there was something risky about bidding because the book was completely unbound and the lot was to be sold not subject to return. In other words, caveat emptor—there was something wrong or irregular about the offering. What I know now is that if a sixteenth-century work was never bound, there is usually a reason, namely, that some part is missing.
The estimated bid was very low, but I asked Quaritches to go higher on my behalf if necessary, because, as I explained, Maestlin's Ephemerides is so rare that I had never seen a copy pass through the market. Shortly after the auction Rick Watson called from Quaritches to say that there was good news and bad news. I had won the ephemerides for less than my bidding limit, but it was a rat-nibbled and incomplete stack of leaves with a problem. "There is something else mixed in, about astronomical hypotheses," he informed me.
"That's very interesting," I responded. "Maestlin held forth in a Tubingen University disputation on astronomical hypotheses, but that little book is really rare. It would be fantastic to get it."
I suppose such occasional public disputations provided the chief intellectual entertainment for university students in those centuries. The printed versions, often not particularly attractive typographically, border on ephemera, and very few copies generally survive. Rick explained that it didn't look like a disputation, and that in any event there seemed to be a letter from Kepler dated 1595 in it. He couldn't see my jaw drop. I told him that when Kepler was a not-yet-famous high school teacher in Graz, he had written a fan letter to Nicolaus Raimerus Ursus regarding his book on the fundamentals of astronomy, and that Ursus subsequently printed it in his De astronomicis hypothesibus. "The book was such a fierce attack that Tycho brought legal action to have the copies banned and burned," I added, "so it's terribly rare."
"That must be it," Rick said. "The title page is missing, but Ursus' name is right here at the front."
The staff at Quaritches hadn't checked out the lot in advance and so were completely blindsided by my extraordinary good luck. Clearly, I had ruined the week for them. But Kepler's naive enthusiasm, which had generated the admiring letter to Ursus, had pretty well ruined a year for him. He had desperately needed a new position after the Catholic rulers of southern Austria expelled all the Lutheran teachers from Graz, leaving as his best (and perhaps only) possibility to go to work for Tycho Brahe, who by 1599 had moved from Uraniborg to Prague under the patronage of Rudolf II. In fact, Kepler didn't know that Ursus had published his letter—he hadn't even kept a copy of it, and Tycho took the opportunity to give Kepler his comeuppance. The arrogant nobleman was not about to stoop to replying to a former swineherd, so instead he assigned the task to young Kepler.
Kepler took up the challenge in a typically Keplerian way. He didn't simply parry and thrust each of Ursus' jabs. Instead, he probed much deeper, into the meaning of astronomical hypotheses and the basis for deciding between them. The result was a serious philosophical treatise, unlike the polemical tracts that characterized many of the Renaissance controversies; in fact, as the translator and commentator Nicholas Jar-dine put it, this was the birth of the history and philosophy of science. Kepler framed his account according to the classical rhetorical rules for a judicial oration, as he had learned at the university. Within these rigid constraints he argued that the astronomer must seek hypotheses that not only predict the phenomena accurately but are also physically plausible. These principles served well to guide his own brilliant researches.
Significant as Kepler's response was, he never saw it published. Ursus had died in 1600, shortly after Tycho had arrived in Prague and started his lawsuit. And by the end of 1601 Tycho, too, was dead. So Kepler simply stashed away the four chapters comprising his tract, where they remained among his legacy until finally, in 1858, they were printed in a comprehensive multivolume edition of his works. But there they continued to sleep for another century until Jardine took a careful look at them, and with a quotient of sideline cheerleading from me, eventually produced a scholarly analysis and English translation. While he was at it, he wrestled with the Bear's somewhat coarse Latin and included the relevant passages in his commentary.
Because of Nick Jardine's involvement with Ursus' text, I couldn't resist phoning him to share the excitement of my astonishing trophy from the Bloomsbury Auction. "My God!" he exclaimed. "You've just acquired the third known copy!"
"No, it's rare, but it can't be that rare," I protested. "There have got to be more copies than that."
It was more than ten years before another copy appeared on the market. This time Rick Watson was determined to capture it, and when he did, he researched the number of extant copies. He was able to locate only eight other copies, two in the United States (including mine) and six in Europe. I've been able to locate only three more. Tycho's lawsuit had been amazingly effective.
NORMALLY, BOOKS don't disappear so dramatically. Galileo's Dialogo, the book that got him in trouble with the Inquisition, was published in an edition of a thousand, and despite the ban by the Inquisitors, it remains one of the most common of the great scientific classics. Apparently, its listing in the Index of Prohibited Books simply made it more apt to be preserved in the seventeenth century. By the same token, Kepler was worried about sales in Catholic countries when his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was placed on the Index, but a correspondent from Venice assured him that his book would be all the more sought after.
One of the most spectacular attritions concerns a famous English translation of Copernicus' cosmological chapters—famous because its version of the heliocentric blueprint has been so widely reproduced. In 1576 the English astronomer Thomas Digges took over his father's perpetual almanac, A Prognostication Everlasting, which had already come out in six previous editions, and added to it an English version of chapters 9 to 11 of the first book of De revolutionibus. A large folding diagram of the heliocentric system showed the starry frame not in a spherical shell but scattered out in all directions. The caption stated, "This orbe of stars fixed infinitely up extendeth hitself in altitude spherically and therefore immovable," which was in itself a remarkable argument for the fixity of the stellar matrix. Of course this was bad news for the empyrean, the home of the blessed, for traditionally heaven had been placed right outside the shell of fixed stars. Digges's solution was ingenious. To the caption he added, "The palace of foelicitie garnished with perpetuall shininge glorious lights innumerable . . . the very court of celestial angells, devoid of greife and replenished with perfite endless joye, the habitacle for the elect."
Digges expressly stated that he had included the Copernican excerpt in the almanac "so that Englishmen might not be deprived of so noble a theory." Eventually, I stumbled onto his own copy of De revolutionibus, which turned up, rather unexpectedly, in the Geneva University library in the course of my systematic survey of Swiss libraries. Digges had scarcely annotated it, but he penned a telling remark on the title page: "Vulgi opinio Error" (the common opinion errs) (plate 7b). His comments thus enroll him among a handful of sixteenth-century readers who accepted the heliocentric doctrine.*
Thomas Digges's diagram of the heliocentric system, with the stars spread out toward infinity from his A Prognostication Everlasting (London, 1592), author's collection.
Thomas Digges's version of A Prognostication Everlasting proved very popular and came out in eight known editions between 1576 and 1626. Typically, only two or three examples from each edition survive, so there could easily have been other editions with no known copies. Just looking over the list, I would guess that there were editions around 1581 and 1588 that have no survivors. For such popular works the production of a thousand copies seems typical, so we can estimate that about 10,000 copies were printed by 1626, yet fewer than 40 examples exist today. This is a survival rate of less than half a percent.
What happened to the 99.5 percent of those copies? Some pages were no doubt used to polish boots or candlesticks, but if unvarnished truth be told, the majority probably literally ended up as toilet paper.
Copernicus' book, on the other hand, was comparatively expensive and became famous early on, so it is unlikely that many copies were deliberately destroyed. In fact, I know of only one specific case. The large Gian Vincenzo Pinelli library, which contained a copy of De revolutionibus, was around 1604 being shipped by sea from Venice to Naples when it was attacked by Turkish pirates. The robbers, so disgusted at finding only books, dumped thirty-three chests overboard. Twenty-two of them were recovered and later purchased by Cardinal Federico Borromeo for his Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Because today the Ambrosiana doesn't have a copy of Copernicus' book with a Pinelli provenance, we can only conclude that Pinelli's copy went to a watery grave.
WHEN I FINALLY published my An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus in 2002, it described 276 copies of the first edition and 325 of the second. I am often asked how many copies were printed in the first place. Since no publisher's records remain from Nuremberg or Basel, the best I can do is make an informed guess, starting with the maximum number the Nuremberg printer Johannes Petreius could have printed.
Some years ago I learned that as a rule of thumb, a single sixteenth-century press could print both sides of a ream of paper in a day, that is, 480 sheets. Each sheet in De revolutionibus contained four pages, and there are just over 400 pages in the book. That would mean at high speed a single press could have printed 480 copies of the book in a hundred days or just under four months. The printing started in the spring of 1542, but was far from complete in the autumn of that year, perhaps because there was some delay in getting the 142 woodblock diagrams cut. The printing was finished around mid-April 1543. Thus more than seven or eight months elapsed for the main part of the printing. Printing a ream of paper a day could have produced as many as a thousand copies during those months. But is the "ream-a-day" rule reliable?
By and by I became curious about the "ream-a-day" report. Could the press really print both sides of the sheet? Wouldn't the wet ink on the one side create a mess? I consulted with veterans of hand-printing techniques, and I examined the vivid description of early printing given in Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography. Gaskell had been librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early days of my Copernicus chase, and I shared various news with him. When I demonstrated that the earliest copy of De revolutionibus owned by Trinity, and probably the very copy that Isaac Newton might have read when he was a fellow there, had in the meantime been sold as an imperfect duplicate, Gaskell went after it. He traded another, perfect copy with the University of Leeds, where I had found the oldest Trinity copy. It reminded me of the merchant in the Thousand and One Nights who offered new lamps for old!
Between Gaskell's book and the advice of the veteran printers, I discovered that the "ream-a-day" estimate was much too low. I learned that the ink had two principal components, the pigment (lampblack or soot) and the vehicle or varnish (such as linseed oil). The paper needed to be damp when printed to get the best impression, or "bite," of the type. In preparation the sheets were individually dipped in water the previous evening and stacked in a heap, generally 250 sheets. One side would be printed in the morning, and the other side in the afternoon before the sheets could dry out. Otherwise, the sheets had to be dampened again before printing on the verso, and the shrinkage could cause problems with dimensional stability. Various precautions, such as wiping off the parchment backing that touched the partially dry ink, prevented offsetting.*
Two pressmen operated the heavy press, one to manage the handheld ink balls with which he would ink up the type before the sheet of paper was put in place, and the other to slide the carriage with the type and overlying sheet of paper into the press proper and to turn down the screw to make the impression. In a really efficient operation an apprentice would place the fresh paper on the tympan (part of the folding apparatus that positioned the paper over the type), and another would remove the printed sheet and carefully stack it in the growing pile. Later the sheets would be hung up to dry. A well-run printing operation obviously had to have a capacious drying room. With a four-man operation 250 sheets could be printed on a press in an hour, about one every fifteen seconds, so 1,500 double-sided sheets could be printed in a twelve-hour day if the stamina of the pressmen held up.
Petreius no doubt had several presses, since during 1543 he produced more than twenty other titles (including three sermons by Andreas Osiander, his Copernican proofreader), and probably his typesetters alternated between projects to keep the presses at work even while a particular project had a pause for proofreading. If Petreius had used two presses, he could have printed a still larger press run in the same elapsed time, but we know he didn't do that. Petreius printed two pages side by side on each sheet, and then two more on the opposite side. Two folded sheets, one inside the other, were used to make a signature of eight pages. Petreius had a single alphabet of fancy initials used for the first letter of each chapter in De revolutionibus, a set cut by the Nuremberg artist Hans Sebald Beham. Only once did he need the same large letter twice on the same sheet and there the second came from a different set of letters. But if he needed the same letter in two successive signatures, as he did for the A in the four signatures P through S, the same fancy letter was used each time. In other words, his compositors distributed the type from each signature before they set the next one.* Had two signatures been running simultaneously on two presses, he would not have had the duplicate fancy letter for the second signature. Because of the proofreading, there would necessarily have been a little lag between breaking down one frame of type and getting the next sheet ready to print. Thus it seems quite unlikely that he could have printed day after day at top speed. In seven or eight months of concentrated effort he could have printed as many as 3,000 copies, but in fact the edition was substantially smaller than this.
Printers working with a sixteenth-century press. The pressman is inking the type while his assistant places a sheet onto the tympan and prepares to fold the frisket over it.
Johannes Petreius, printer of the first edition of De revolutionibus, from J. G. Doppelmayr's Historische Nachricht von den niirnbergischen Mathematicis und Kiinstlern (Nuremberg, 1730).
Although we have no records from Petreius' shop, excellent records come down to us from the sixteenth-century Plantin-Moretus Press in Antwerp. Although it was a larger establishment than Petreius' (or at least it produced more titles), it must have been comparable in many other aspects. At the well-documented Antwerp shop, the press runs ranged from two hundred (for subsidized, special editions) to about 2,500. For popular works such as liturgical texts or herbals, 1,250 was Plantin's favorite number. Since paper was one of the most expensive parts of a printing operation, Petreius would not have wanted to overestimate his sales. Clearly, a work as large and technical as De revolutionibus would have required a considerably smaller print run than 1,250. But how much smaller?
There are a couple of ways to use the number of surviving copies to estimate how many he actually printed, first, by comparing the number of surviving copies of De revolutionibus with some similar book where it is known from the records how many were printed. For example, a huge number—a thousand copies—were printed of Galileo's Dialogo, and a substantial number survive, so that the price of his first edition is much, much lower than for Copernicus' book. The big computer database, the OCLC,* gave eighteen copies of Copernicus' first edition, but thirty-three of the Dialogo. This suggests that about half as many copies of De revolutionibus were printed, that is, a press run of around five hundred.
Matching up numbers of books in the OCLC sounds easy, but in fact it's not, because that database is so corrupted on this kind of thing. Untrained students all over the country were hired by various colleges to enter the thousands of volumes into the database, and many smaller schools simply have facsimiles of these rare books, not the expensive treasures themselves. As a result, about a third of the purported sixteenth-century copies of Copernicus' book turn out to be twentieth-century reprints. I proposed to compare four early science titles whose press runs were known with four that were not, including the first- and second-edition De revolutionibus. In the end my staff had to undertake a marathon phone campaign to several score libraries in order to purge the list of the false entries.
My OCLC survey came up with three surprises. Kepler had collected part of his back salary from the emperor in paper, enough for a thousand copies of his Rudolphine Tables. But the scarcity of that title today suggests that only around 550 copies were actually printed (in which case Kepler sold the rest of his paper to make up for his back salary), or else that a substantial part of the press run remained unsold and was eventually pulped.
The second surprise concerned the print run of the first edition of Newton's Principia. We know that 750 copies were printed of the second edition, but the best guess for the first edition had been 400 copies. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so astonished to find that there seem to be more copies of the first edition than the second, because the Principia has always sold for only about a third as much as a De revolutionibus. It's clearly a more common book. There is no escaping the fact that more than 600 copies of the original, 1687 edition of Newton's Principia were printed, possibly as many as 750 copies. By the same reasoning, substantially fewer copies of De revolutionibus came off the press.
Finally, the biggest anomaly of the survey was the extraordinary rarity of Galileo's first astronomical treatise, Sidereus nundus or Sidereal Messenger, which announced his spectacular telescopic discoveries. In a letter of March 1610 to Cosimo de' Medici's personal secretary, Galileo mentioned that 550 copies had been printed. The OCLC survey picked up only five copies, compared with twenty-one for the second edition of Copernicus' book, which probably had about the same number printed. I can only ascribe this paucity to what I call Stoddard's Law: "Bigger books linger longer." (It takes half a dozen Sidereus nundus copies to fill the space of one Dialogo or De revolutionibus.) I remember trying to persuade Roger Stoddard, one of Harvard's most knowledgeable librarians, to bid for a copy of De nive sexangula (The Six-Cornered Snowflake), a booklet that Kepler had put out as a New Year's gift for a distinguished friend, and which is now regarded as a seminal treatise on mineralogy. "It can't be too expensive," I opined, "since it's so thin." Roger groaned and retorted, "Everything you say about it makes it more expensive. Other things being equal, thin books are much harder to find than thick ones."*
ANOTHER INGENIOUS scheme for deducing the number of Copernicus copies printed, similar to what pollsters use, was suggested to me by a Cambridge neighbor, the MIT physicist Philip Morrison. He proposed making a list of astronomers working between, say, 1543 and 1610 who would likely have owned the book, and then see how many have been found. Such a representative sample would go something like this:
If in my searching I had matched half as owners of the book (the asterisks in the list show the owners actually identified in the Census) and we assume the others on the list owned the book, but their copies have been lost, then we would deduce a survival rate of 50 percent. It's easy to see the loopholes in this procedure. Maybe not all of them actually owned the book, or maybe owners didn't bother to inscribe their books. Kepler, for example, seemed never to have written his name in the books he owned, and his copy of De revolutionibus was identified from other evidence. So this procedure will overestimate the number printed unless some correction factor is taken into account. If one assumes the corrected survival rate to be closer to 60 percent, then the 276 copies of the first edition and 325 of the second recorded in the Census would represent print runs of 400—500 and 500—550 respectively, in reasonable concordance with the larger number of printed copies of the Principia*
If my estimate of the number printed is correct, then more than half the copies printed have survived. Unlike the ephemeral A Prognostication Euerlasting, Copernicus' De revolutionibus quickly gained a reputation as an important book, so few people would have deliberately destroyed a copy, although it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land. The radical English Protestant reformer and sometime playwright John Bale, writing in 1549, remarked that the purchasers of libraries "reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes [Johns], some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, & some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sopesellers, & some they sent oversee to the bokebynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full.... I know a merchaunt man, whych shall at thys tyme be namelesse, that boughte the contentes of two noble lybraryes for xl shyllynges pryce, a shame it is to be spoken."
The fact that De revolutionibus was a fairly expensive book may have helped protect it. Here and there I found copies with prices written in, although the currency is apt to be ambiguous. The best record is in a copy I found in Dresden, where the astronomer Valentin Engelhart in 1545 tallied the prices of several titles bound together. The Copernicus cost one florin, equivalent to twelve groschen. During this time the university matriculation fees were in the range of six to ten groschen, and when Rheticus was being enticed to a professorship in Leipzig, he was offered the special salary of 140 florins per annum. I have wrestled with the value of currency in the sixteenth century for a long time. Personal services and food were cheap in those days, so the relative strength of the money can't easily be compared with living standards today. Perhaps an astronomy professor who took his studies seriously didn't balk at paying about 1 percent of his annual salary for an important volume, but he surely took good care of his book.*
So, WITH 400-500 copies printed in 1543, and 276 accounted for in the Census, where did the missing Copernicus books go? Inspecting hundreds of copies of De revolutionibus has convinced me that water is the chief enemy of books. A substantial number show the traces of dampstaining. For millennia architects have been working to perfect roofs, but every time I visit Harvard's Science Center during a rainstorm, I know it has been a losing battle. And when I served on the Yale Library Visiting Committee, our first assignment was a tour to see how disastrously the roof of the Sterling Library leaked. For every heavily dampstained copy recorded in the Census, there must have been a copy discarded because it was so thoroughly soaked that it turned purple with mildew or simply became papier-mache.
Bookworms have riddled a number of copies. I thought I had never laid eyes on a bookworm, living or dead. Many of my students suppose it's a mythical beast and are incredulous when shown pages perforated by their trails. I didn't remember even seeing a picture of a bookworm, so was taken by surprise to discover that one is shown in Robert Hooke's well-illustrated Micrographia of 1665. From the small, round bores in early books, I had always assumed that the hungry insect was a cylindrical worm, but Hooke's enlargement pretty clearly shows a silverfish. Hooke himself described the insect as "the silver-colour'd Book-worm" and reported that "this Animal probably feeds upon the Paper and covers of Books, and perforates them in several small round holes." In fact, the Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates that a variety of insects qualify as bookworms, with the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) as the leading candidate.
I was pretty puzzled about how a silverfish could create round bore holes, but eventually found the answers from Nicholas Pickwoad, an English expert who was helping Harvard University on its numerous book conservation problems. The silverfish feasts on mold damage, so it proliferates in humid environments. Its damage is generally to the surface of a page or to a leather binding. In contrast, the round bore holes often seen in early books were caused by the hungry grubs of the deathwatch beetle (family Anobidae), which can eat right through the pages of books on a library shelf or penetrate furniture. The beetle lays it eggs near a source of food, for instance, in a crack or crevice of a well-stocked bookshelf, and the larva bores its way through its food supply, sometimes taking as long as ten years before it finally metamorphoses into a beetle. Presumably, the really well-drilled copies of De revolutionibus have long since been scrapped.
The silverfish bookworm from Robert Hooke's Micrographia (London, 1665).
Rodents can make even quicker work of an ill-fated volume. A few years ago the Carnegie Institution of Washington put its library in warehouse storage while its premises were being remodeled. The books were placed on sledges and carefully covered with tarpaulins to secure them against water damage; not until several weeks later did it finally occur to someone to include rat poison in the precautions, but it was already too late. Today the Carnegie Institution has a library with scores of missing spines nibbled away by the rodents.
Fire ranks low in the list of book destroyers. I have tried without success to document whether any copies of Copernicus' book were lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Possibly so, but there is no evidence. A copy was lost when the Great Tower burned in Copenhagen in 1728, presumably another when the Strasbourg Library was destroyed in the Franco-German War in 1870, and a first edition went up in flames when the retreating Nazis deliberately burned the National Library in Warsaw in the autumn of 1944. Demolition bombing in World War II brought about substantial losses of De revolutionibus, in Douai, Frankfurt, Munich, and Dresden.
THE MORE cheerful reverse side of the coin is not the enemies of books but their friends, the booksellers who made it possible to obtain a copy in the first place. When De revolutionibus was published in 1543, printing with movable type had been in use less than a century. Yet by that time modes of international distribution had already been established, primarily through large regional fairs. Printers and booksellers came together especially in Frankfurt, which had already been established as a leading fair in the late Middle Ages. In 1543 it would have been the place for booksellers to pick up a stock of Copernicus' book, always as stacks of unbound sheets.* Being a bookbinder was an entirely different profession from the printer; not until the seventeenth century did it become relatively common for printers to package their wares in cheap temporary paper bindings.
In 1564 a catalog listing the various new titles on offer at the Frankfurt Book Fair was issued, the first in a long-running series of such booklets. Toward the end of the century, when young Johannes Kepler proudly authored his first major book, it too was offered at the fair—but Kepler was devastated to discover that his name was misspelled in the catalog. I didn't have much sympathy for Kepler when I read about this, because he tended to write the K of his name so ambiguously that it could easily be mistaken for an R.† In any event, I became very curious to see a copy of the catalog in question.
One day when I was in Harvard's Houghton Library, it occurred to me to inquire how to find the catalogs in a major German library such as Munich's or Stuttgart's. I knew that the European libraries generally listed their books just by authors, so I wondered whether I would have to know the cataloger's name to find out if the old Frankfurt Book Fair catalogs were held there. I had forgotten about my inquiry when roughly a year later the senior librarian and I bumped into each other in the reading room once again.
"Do you remember your inquiry about the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogs?" he asked. I nodded affirmatively. "Well, we've found them."
I was rather taken aback by the way he put it. "What do you mean, you've found them?" I asked.
He hung his head, at least figuratively, and explained that the library had recently got an inquiry from someone who wanted to produce a facsimile of one of them. It turned out that just before World War II Harvard had bought a leading collection of these catalogs, but they were so complicated bibliographically that no one had had the courage to catalog them, so they just sat in the Houghton stacks until everyone completely forgot about them. The staff finally located the bundle after they realized that they had to be there someplace.
In the early 1970s a German publisher made a facsimile edition of the entire set, except that the catalog for the autumn fair in 1598 couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. Researchers finally traced Harvard's purchase, and there it was, probably the unique copy of the missing catalog. ("Little pamphlets linger least.") It is fascinating to pore over the thin, fragile catalogs, a spring and autumn edition each year, with the books arranged in broad categories, the Latin titles in Roman letters and the German titles in Gothic type: Protestant theology, Pontifical theology, Music, History, Poetry, and "Philosophy, Humane Arts, and Polite Literature." In that latter category in the fall of 1566, the third year of the catalogs, Copernicus' De revolutionibus was listed. It was a folio from Basel, publisher and price not specified. This, the second edition, came from Heinrich Petri, a printer of scholarly works in Basel, possibly a relative of Johannes Petreius of Nuremberg. By 1566 Heinrich had involved his son, Sebastian, the man who would eventually carry on the business under the name Sebastian Heinrichpetri, so in that year the publisher's identification on the title page read "Ex officina Henricpetrina."
The supreme irony of this story is that the Harvard set of Frankfurt catalogs isn't complete. Despite having the unique 1598 catalog, Houghton Library lacks the spring and fall 1597 catalogs, one of which listed Kepler's Mysterium cosmographicum. I now know you have to look under Georg Wilier to find them, but I still haven't actually seen an original copy listing the author Repleo.
INCIDENTALLY, THERE was another way books could disappear—by being deliberately destroyed when they were listed in the Index of Prohibited Books. De revolutionibus was placed on the Catholic Index in 1616.
* Oxford English Dictionary: "The literal meaning of'morganatic marriage' is, as explained in a 16th c. passage . . . a marriage in which the wife and the children that may be born are entitled to no share in the husband's possessions beyond the 'morning-gift'. The distinctive epithet of that kind of marriage by which a man of exalted rank takes to wife a woman of lower station, with the provision that she remains in her former rank, and that the issue of the marriage have no claim to succeed to the possession or dignities of their father."
* lt would, of course, be intriguing to find out how Digges's copy had got from England to Switzerland, but the trail has gone cold. We know only rhat the book arrived in what was then the Geneva Public Library in 1893 from the heirs of a local collecror.
* I assumed that everyone knew what offsetting is, but when both Miriam and my editor queried this term, I realized that my many hours spent in typesetting and my youthful passion as a collector of U.S. stamps had given me a specialist vocabulary. American stamps were originally printed from flat plates, a technique descended from the presses rhat Petreius used. But in 1915 rotary presses were introduced for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which produced the stamps. Because the process of bending the plates into a cylinder stretched the printing surface, such stamps were about a millimeter taller or wider than the flat-plate images. Rotary presses allow continuous rolls of paper to be fed into the press, a technique that made modern newspaper production possible, not to mention the long strips for coil stamps, which the post office desired. From 1918 to 1920 the postal authorities experimented with offset printing. In this process a direct image plate (as opposed to the mirror image plates of the flat-plate and rotary press plates) transferred an inked mirror image onto an "offset" roller, which then printed the actual sheet. These offset printed stamps are distinctly softer than the crisp lines of the direct printing. The mimeograph process, ditto machines, and multilith machines, commonplace in offices in the 1950s and 1960s, used this offset process so that the master sheets did not have to be prepared as mirror images. So to refer to offsetting means that the ink is transferred to another surface and then in turn printed onto the final sheet—in the case of a sixteenth-century press, from the back side of a partially dry page onto the parchment platen or backing sheet and then, unintended, onto the back side of the next sheet fed into the press.
* Distributed is another technical typographer's term, meaning rhar the type has been alphabetically sorted into a special type case, ready to be set again.
* OCLC once stood for Ohio College Library Center but was subsequently generalized to On-line Computer Library Center.
* ln any event, Stoddard put in a successful bid, and today Harvard has one of the world's largesr holdings of Kepler titles, second only to the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart.
* It might be objected that if the 1543 De revolutionibus sells for two or three times as much as the 1687 Principia, it ought to be two or three times rarer. The numbers do not scale this way because Copernicus' book is jusr enough scarcer that the pressure on its price is actually quite disproportionate to its rarity.
* The size of the sixteenth-century library of one Stephan Roth is astounding. He had studied under Luther in Wittenberg and eventually became chief city clerk in Zwickau. I went to see his Copernicus in the summer of 1976 in what was then a drab East German town, but the library was wonderful. Roth had amassed a collection of 6,000 titles in the 1530s and 1540s. Being city clerk must have been a lucrative post!
* Even today the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, held in the fall, brings publishers together from all parts of the world.
† Ursus had mispelled the name as Repler when he seized the opportunity of including Kepler's letter in his scurrilous attack on Tycho Brahe.