SPRING 1543. Europe was in turmoil. The German princes had taken over the banner of Protestantism from an aging Martin Luther, and Europe was poised on the brink of war. Nicolaus Copernicus was lying on his deathbed when his fellow clerics at the Frauenburg cathedral brought him a long-awaited package. From the German printer Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg, hundreds of miles away, a precious sheaf of paper had finally come to this northernmost Catholic diocese in Poland, the opening pages (but the last to be printed) of the greatest scientific book of the sixteenth century. On the first sheet stood the title: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Brother Nicolaus scarcely knew what an epoch-making treasure he held.
Fast forward by four and a half centuries. The Polish astronomer's book has become a classic of the Scientific Revolution. On my desk is a cartoon strip in which a youngster reports to an impressed parent that he is studying Copernicus' De revolutionibus in school. The punch line is in the second panel: "Yes, we're learning how to pronounce it!"
That in itself is no mean feat, but essential to the tale that follows. "Day-revoluty-OWN-ibus" is a good approximation. The full printed title is De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex, literally "Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres," but there is evidence that Copernicus intended only the short form, On the Revolutions. So De revolutionibus is the way it is almost invariably referred to, except very occasionally when the astronomer's name itself—"a Copernicus"— becomes a synonym.
De revolutionibus was branded "the book that nobody read" by Arthur Koestler in his best-selling history of early astronomy, The Sleepwalkers. Koestler's highly controversial account, published in 1959, greatly stimulated my own interest in the history of science. At the time, none of us could prove or disprove his claim about Copernicus' text. Clearly, however, Koestler, a consummate novelist famous for his gripping Darkness at Noon, saw the world in terms of antagonists. Creating a historical vision with Kepler as hero demanded villains, and Koestler placed Copernicus and Galileo into those roles. Copernicus became his hapless victim.
My personal connection with Copernicus, though I could not have known it then, began in the wee hours of June 20, 1946, as the SS Stephen R. Mallory pulled away from its dock in Newport News, Virginia, on what was to prove a troubled yet memorable voyage. The Mallory was a reconditioned Liberty ship, outfitted with enough stalls to hold 847 horses, destined for war-torn Poland. It was a year after the conclusion of World War II, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration had set up a massive assistance effort. As part of the program, they sent thousands of horses to a devastated Eastern Europe. The Brethren Service Commission, an arm of one of the historic peace churches, had its own "Heifers for Relief project. They cut a deal with UNRRA: If the United Nations would provide ships for the heifers, they would help find cowboys for the horse ships. Thus my father, a professor of history at a small Mennonite college, rounded up thirty-two potential cowboys—most of us real greenhorns— and headed for Newport News that summer. I was the second youngest cowboy aboard that ship, just past my sixteenth birthday and hence by a narrow margin qualified for a merchant marine seaman's card. The passage of time has blurred my impressions of that ocean journey, but the desolation of Poland, with its concomitant black marketeering and prostitution, burned searing images into my memory.
Two decades later I was a newly minted Ph.D. in astrophysics with a nascent attraction toward the history of astronomy. At an international astronomical conference I met Jerzy Dobrzycki, an astronomer from Poland with similar interests. I related my earlier adventure with the horses, after which he urged me to visit his country again, in particular when the historians of science were gathering for their international congress in 1965. So I did, and I soon became deeply involved with the grand worldwide preparations to celebrate the Quinquecentennial of Nicolaus Copernicus, five hundred years after his birth in 1473, which brought me frequently to Poland.
One expectation worried me. I had become a Smithsonian professor of astronomy and history of science at Harvard, and it seemed unlikely that the Quinquecentennial would pass without my being expected to lecture about Copernicus. But following centuries of Copernican scholarship, what remained to be discovered? What fresh insights could I possibly offer during the forthcoming anniversary celebrations? And what if Koestler were really right, that De revolutionibus was so technical and dull that nobody read it?
The epiphany dawned when I least expected it, in the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, where I was exploring a huge safe full of rare astronomy books in November 1970. Among the rows of volumes, I found a first edition of Copernicus' book. Here, surprisingly, was a copy richly annotated from beginning to end. If the book had so few readers, I wondered, why was one of the handful of copies I had ever examined so thoroughly studied? Curiously, the parts expounding the Sun-centered, or heliocentric, cosmology were barely marked, while marginalia abounded in the latter, heavily technical passages. Who could have done this, and what might I find if I looked at some more copies of the book?
It took some sleuthing to discover that the anonymous annotator of the Edinburgh Copernicus was the leading astronomy teacher of northern Europe in the 1540s, one Erasmus Reinhold. His book became the catalyst that inaugurated my obsession to survey every surviving copy of Copernicus' book. That quest led me hundreds of thousands of miles, from Aarhus to Beijing to Coimbra to Dublin, from Melbourne to Moscow, from St. Gallen to San Diego. And even Edinburgh had only just begun to reveal its surprises.
Koestler was, I am happy to report, quite wrong in declaring that De revolutionibus was the book nobody read, though it took the better part of a decade to be sure and thirty years to carefully document the book's impact. Eventually I found copies owned by saints, heretics, and scalawags, by musicians, movie stars, medicine men, and bibliomaniacs. But most interesting are the exemplars once owned and annotated by astronomers, which illuminate the long process of acceptance of the Sun-centered cosmos as a physically real description of the world. Here are fascinating turf battles among astronomers as well as the struggle of the Church to come to terms with the new reality.
What follows is the story of how an intensely technical sixteenth-century treatise launched a revolution even more profound than the Reformation and how the copies have evolved into million-dollar cultural icons. But more specifically, it is a personal memoir about the making of An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus, a four-hundred-page reference work published in February 2002. The Census describes individually six hundred printed copies of Copernicus' magnum opus. I dedicated those results to the members of the Petreius Society, a wholly fictitious organization that I named after the original printer of De revolutionibus. To qualify, a member must have seen at least a hundred sixteenth-century copies of Copernicus' book, that is, either the 1543 first edition or the second edition, a reprint of 1566. My wife, Miriam, a companion on many of my book-hunting field trips, has shared much of the adventure and surely has met the criterion for membership in the Petreius Society. Jerzy Dobrzycki, who had invited me to return to Poland, became an invaluable confederate in the enterprise; his deep knowledge of all things Copernican and his linguistic skills provided an essential resource for the project. During the years as the census progressed he became professor and eventually director of the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The other member of this exclusive society is Robert S. Westman, a professor of history at the University of California at San Diego, originally a rival with his own independent search for Copernicus' book, and eventually a trusted teammate.
Were they still alive, I might have considered honorary membership for two others. One was Harrison Horblit, a leading collector of rare science books, who formerly owned the most important copy of Copernicus' book in private hands. It was a presentation copy inscribed by Copernicus' only disciple to the dean at the University of Wittenberg, and a book that figures in the story that follows. Horblit was the first such collector I met, and his enthusiasm for early books lured me into this lovely vice; my own collection now includes a number of volumes that were once his. The other was Edward Rosen, a professor of history at the City College of New York, and, as my survey began, the leading authority on Copernicus and his work. I still frequently refer to his many books and translations, even though, as my memoir makes clear, I ultimately differed on several of his firmly held opinions.
For nearly half a century I have written detailed weekly letters to my parents or to our children, and copies of this extensive correspondence have proved invaluable for establishing many otherwise forgotten details and a firm chronology for the episodes recounted here. The conversations and court testimony are based on vivid memories and, I believe, accurately reflect the historical flow of events.
Besides my immense gratitude to the members of the Petreius Society, I would like to thank Dava Sobel, Kitty Ferguson, Mark Gingerich, and Dennis Danielson for their critical readings of all or parts of earlier drafts of this memoir. Special thanks go to Edward Tenner, who suggested I write this book. But most of all, I wish to register my appreciation for the enthusiastic reception of this project given by George Gibson, publisher of Walker & Company, and my admiration for his perceptive editing.
Finally, I must add a few words about the illustrations. I have taken the majority of photographs found here, and I greatly appreciate the privileges extended to me by librarians and collectors throughout the world. Several of the pictures were taken by the eminent designer and photographer Charles Eames, and I thank his estate for permission to use them. The color reproduction of Tobias Stimmer's portrait of Copernicus on the astronomical clock in the Strasbourg cathedral turned out to be a special project. The portrait is twenty feet above the floor level, and use of the picture required the permissions of the mayor of Strasbourg, the antiquities commission, the archdeacon of the cathedral, and the president of the region. I thank Georges Frick and William Shea for their effective diplomacy. And last, I owe a debt of gratitude to Teasel Muir-Harmony for her dedication in processing the images for reproduction.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
July, 2003