Copernicus De Revolutionibus (1st ed.)

Twenty years in a drawer

Copernicus first set out his sun-centered system in a short, untitled, anonymous manuscript he passed to a few friends, now called the Commentariolus. A physician's library list from 1514 describes a manuscript that matches it, so he was at work on the idea by then. The full treatise grew slowly. By the 1530s much of it was written, but he hesitated to publish, and in 1536 Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg wrote urging him to go ahead.

The push that worked came from a young mathematician. In 1539 Georg Joachim Rheticus arrived from Wittenberg in Frauenburg (Frombork) to study with him, read the manuscript, and wrote a nontechnical summary that was published in Danzig in 1540 as the Narratio prima. Its friendly reception persuaded Copernicus to let a trigonometry section appear in 1542, and then to release the whole work to the Nuremberg printer Johann Petreius.

Copernicus's own manuscript survives. It is kept at the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków under the shelf number BJ 10 000, and the different papers in it have let scholars reconstruct roughly when each part was written.

The canon of Frombork

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Thorn (Toruń), in Royal Prussia within the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, the youngest of four children of a copper merchant from Kraków. His father died around 1483, and his maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, who became Bishop of Warmia in 1489, took charge of his education and career.

He studied at Kraków from 1491, then at Bologna from 1496, where he lodged with and assisted the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara. He studied medicine at Padua, and on May 31, 1503, he took a doctorate in canon law at Ferrara. From 1497 he held a canonry in the Warmia cathedral chapter, and he spent his working life there as churchman, physician, administrator and astronomer.

His interests ran past astronomy. In 1517 he worked out a quantity theory of money, and in 1519 he stated the principle later known as Gresham's law. He never married. Toward the end of 1542 he suffered a stroke and paralysis, and he died on May 24, 1543, aged 70. The story that he was handed the final printed pages of his book on the day he died is a legend, not documented fact.

Nuremberg, 1543

Rheticus delivered the manuscript to Petreius in 1542 and acted as editor and proofreader until he left to teach at Leipzig. The Lutheran preacher Andreas Osiander then took over. Fearing a hostile reaction, Osiander added an unsigned note to the reader saying the book's hypotheses 'need not be true or even probable' so long as they matched observation. The title words 'orbium coelestium' were probably also his addition.

Behind that note came Copernicus's own preface, dedicating the work to Pope Paul III. The book follows the plan of Ptolemy's Almagest in six books: the general heliocentric picture, spherical astronomy and a star catalog, the motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets in longitude and in latitude. It keeps uniform circular motion and epicycles, which is why it still needed so much geometry.

Rheticus and other followers considered Osiander's note a betrayal. Several surviving copies have the note and the words 'orbium coelestium' struck through, believed to be in Rheticus's hand. Johannes Kepler publicly named Osiander as its author in 1609, in his Astronomia nova. Demand was modest at first: an initial printing of 400 copies did not sell out.

The marquis's copy

The copy sold in 2008 is a complete first edition: 202 leaves with 148 woodcut diagrams, tables of calculations and ornamental initials partly attributed to Hans Sebald Beham. It is still in a contemporary binding of flexible vellum, with early handwritten scientific calculations on the front cover, and it was described at the sale as unwashed, unpressed and exceptionally wide-margined, with many deckle edges preserved.

The condition notes are candid. The title page is slightly soiled, the final leaf was pressed and reinserted with its blank upper and outer margins renewed, there are a few pale marginal damp stains, and the foot of the spine, the back joint and a corner of the back cover have been repaired. The back free endpaper is gone. In Gingerich's census it is entry I.263.

Its earliest recorded owner was Nicolas-Joseph Foucault (1643-1721), first marquis de Magny, an archaeologist, lawyer and administrator whose library also held Newton. The book resurfaced in a Paris bookseller's catalog in 1957, passed to a New York dealer, and was bought that year by the cardiologist Myron Prinzmetal (1908-1987). Richard Green bought it through a dealer in 1975.

The Richard Green sale

Richard Green, a retired physician and amateur astronomer from Long Island, began building a scientific library in the 1970s. It spanned six centuries, with works by Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Marx and Einstein, and it was offered in New York on June 17, 2008. News reports describe it as more than 300 books; one account counts 346, of which 289 lots sold.

The Copernicus was the centerpiece, billed as arguably the finest copy in private hands. Estimated at $900,000 to $1.2 million, it sold for $2,210,500 including the buyer's premium, nearly double the high estimate. The buyer was not named. The whole sale brought more than $11 million against a presale estimate of about $6 million.

Other lots showed how hot the room was. An 1878 New Haven telephone directory listing 391 subscribers, estimated at $30,000 to $40,000, went for $170,500 after six collectors competed for it. A 1545 Spanish navigation book sold for $578,500 and a Galileo treatise for $506,500. For comparison, a different first-edition De revolutionibus in much poorer condition sold in London in 2021 for 277,200 pounds, reported as $391,767.

The book nobody read?

Arthur Koestler called De revolutionibus 'the book that nobody read.' Owen Gingerich spent 35 years examining every surviving copy of the first two editions to test that claim. His census counted 276 copies of the 1543 edition and 325 of the 1566 Basel edition, and the notes in their margins showed that nearly every leading astronomer of the era owned and read it, though most skipped the cosmology for the planetary models. He told the story in The Book Nobody Read (2004).

The reckoning came later. On March 5, 1616, the Congregation of the Index suspended the book 'until corrected.' Nine sentences presenting the system as certain were marked for change, the corrections were approved in 1620, and the uncorrected book stayed on the Index until 1758. Meanwhile Erasmus Reinhold's Prutenic Tables (1551), built on Copernicus's methods, became the basis for the calendar reform of 1582.

Copernicus's own grave was lost for centuries. Searchers in Frombork Cathedral found remains in 2005 and announced the identification on November 3, 2008, five months after the Green sale, after matching their DNA to hairs found in a book he had owned. He was reburied there on May 22, 2010, under a tombstone showing a golden Sun circled by six planets.

Timeline

1. Feb 19, 1473

   Nicolaus Copernicus is born in Thorn (Toruń), Royal Prussia.

2. 1491

   Copernicus enrolls at the University of Kraków.

3. 1496

   He enrolls in law at Bologna and becomes assistant to the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara.

4. Oct 20, 1497

   He formally takes up his canonry in the Warmia cathedral chapter.

5. May 31, 1503

   He receives a doctorate in canon law at Ferrara.

6. 1514

   A physician's library list records a manuscript matching the Commentariolus, his first sketch of the system.

7. 1539

   Georg Joachim Rheticus arrives in Frombork to study with Copernicus.

8. 1540

   Rheticus publishes the Narratio prima in Danzig.

9. 1542

   Rheticus delivers the manuscript to the printer Johann Petreius in Nuremberg; late in the year Copernicus suffers a stroke.

10. 1543

    De revolutionibus is published in Nuremberg with Osiander's unsigned preface.

11. May 24, 1543

    Copernicus dies, aged 70.

12. 1566

    The second edition is printed in Basel.

13. 1609

    Kepler names Osiander as the author of the preface in Astronomia nova.

14. Mar 5, 1616

    The Congregation of the Index suspends the book until corrected.

15. 1758

    The uncorrected book is dropped from the Index.

16. 1957

    This copy, once the marquis de Magny's, appears in a Paris bookseller's catalog and is bought by Dr. Myron Prinzmetal.

17. 1975

    Dr. Richard Green acquires the copy.

18. 2004

    Owen Gingerich publishes The Book Nobody Read, built on his census of surviving copies.

19. Jun 17, 2008

    The copy sells at auction in New York for $2,210,500.

20. May 22, 2010

    Copernicus is reburied in Frombork Cathedral after his remains are identified.

The world in 1543

• Feb 21, 1543

  An Ethiopian-Portuguese force defeats the army of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi at Wayna Daga, ending the Ethiopian-Adal war.

• Jun 1543

  Andreas Vesalius publishes De humani corporis fabrica, remaking the study of human anatomy.

• Jul 12, 1543

  Henry VIII of England marries Catherine Parr, his sixth and last wife.

• Aug 22, 1543

  Ottoman and French forces under Hayreddin Barbarossa capture Nice.

• Aug 25, 1543

  Portuguese traders land on Tanegashima, the first Europeans to reach Japan, and introduce firearms there.

• Sep 9, 1543

  Mary Stuart is crowned Queen of Scots at Stirling, aged nine months.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Copernicus De Revolutionibus (1st ed.) is number 40 of 100 in the memorabilia entries of the FLOAT 100. 100 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (42 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The first printing of about 400 copies did not sell out, yet more first editions survive (276 in Gingerich's census) than Shakespeare First Folios (228).
• The famous preface calling the theory a mere calculating device was not by Copernicus; the preacher Andreas Osiander added it without signing it.
• Copernicus also stated the money principle later called Gresham's law, in 1519.
• His handwritten manuscript of the book survives in Kraków, shelf number BJ 10 000.
• His remains were identified in 2008 by matching their DNA to hairs found in a book he had owned, now kept at Uppsala University in Sweden.
• The 2008 sale that set the Copernicus record also sold an 1878 New Haven phone book for $170,500, more than four times its high estimate.