This uniquely fascinating work is not a restful read. Its subject is enthralling; its author sounds delightful. However, it dashes about with such unrelenting enthusiasm, and throws in such a heady variety of anecdote and scholarship, that after 300 pages even the most appreciative reader may feel limp.
Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy at Harvard, is a learned bibliophile with a particular interest in the history of his science. Around 30 years ago, he became especially preoccupied by Copernicus, the man who first proposed, in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543), that the earth went around the sun. Struck by a remark by Arthur Koestler, that none of Copernicus's contemporaries had actually read this epochal work, Gingerich became curious about the book itself, both as a scientist and as a book collector. He set out to compile a census of all surviving copies of its first and second editions, with an emphasis on annotated copies that might disprove Koestler's rash assertion.
The Book Nobody Read is the story of Gingerich's quest. It took the irrepressible professor, often accompanied by his wife Miriam, on an immense series of journeys to all parts of the world, tracing the whereabouts, the condition and, above all, the provenance of some 600 surviving volumes. In telling his tale, Gingerich leaves nothing to our surmise. Occasionally, the book reads like one of those round-robin letters that people send out at Christmas: "It was dumb luck that Miriam and I missed the flight out of Oklahoma City . . . Whoops - your plane left half an hour ago!" There are hints of rivalries in academe, involved accounts of scams and skulduggery, detailed calli-graphic assessments.
In the end, though, even the most flaccid (and astronomically illiterate) reader will be won over by the delights and disappointments of Gingerich's trail. How exciting to discover that the Royal Scottish Observatory's first edition of De Revolutionibus has actually been annotated by Erasmus Reinhold. And what a moment of truth to find that the annotations in the Vatican are not, after all, by Tycho Brahe, but by Paul Wittich of Wratislavia. Look at this: Mercator's own handwriting in the Willebrord Snell first edition at Glasgow. No doubt about it - that tail to the letter "g" clinches it! What a frisson to realise that a wormhole in the Dibner Library's first edition in Washington stops at the rare errata page and then continues on the other side. And lucky, lucky Miriam to be the "only person in history science circles" to be given a tour of Shirburn Castle, where the Earl of Macclesfield keeps his two editions (one first, one second).
Over the centuries, the 600 volumes, increasing astronomically in value, have passed through the hands of a marvellous variety of owners in a wonderful variety of places. There is one at West Point. There is one in the Lincolnshire Central Reference Library. In France, 30 municipal libraries, from La Rochelle to St Omer, possess a copy each, and so did the Institut Mittag-Leffler in Djursholm, Sweden, until somebody stole it. Gingerich obligingly tells us how far we are likely to live from the nearest copy - 6,000 miles if our home is in Cape Town (Naples is the closest), 4,000 miles if it's in Delhi (about equidistant from copies in Moscow, Manila or Hiroshima). If we live anywhere near Cambridge, 12 copies await us just down the road.
All this, perhaps, makes it sound as if the professor's odyssey is little more than the trail of an anorak cult. But it is far more than that. He is learnedly pursuing not just the volumes themselves, but all they can tell us about the development of astronomy, and especially about the revolution in perceptions that De Revolutionibus brought about. The most interesting parts of Gingerich's own book illustrate how immensely difficult it was for scientists, philosophers and theologians of the day to adjust to the idea that their earth was not, after all, the centre of the universe.
How earnestly, and how indefatigably, humanity's sages had groped towards the truth. They had accurately computed the apparent motion of the planets long before, so that they could predict how Saturn or Venus would seem to stand in the night sky from one century to another. Yet it was only when Copernicus dared to challenge the wisdom of the ages that they understood the reasons for those phenomena. Professor Gingerich's exuberant search is in itself a sort of allegory, for it bridges in our minds the gap between a world that assumed the love of God to be the energy that turned the spheres, and a world that can land a TV camera on Mars, and summon its pictures to our firesides as easily as EastEnders.
Jan Morris's latest book is A Writer's World: travels 1950-2000 (Faber & Faber)
