The Book Nobody Read : In Pursuit of the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus

In 1543, one of the greatest scientific works made its debut: De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), in which Nicolaus Copernicus radically altered the composition of the cosmos by placing the sun, and not the earth, at the centre of the universe. But did anyone take notice? Four and a half centuries later, astrophysicist Owen Gingerich was intrigued by the bold claim - made by Arthur Koestler in his bestselling The Sleepwalkers - that sixteenth century Europe paid little attention to the groundbreaking, but dense, masterpiece. Gingerich embarked on a thirty year odyssey to examine every extant copy to prove Koestler wrong. Logging thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of miles - from Melbourne to Moscow; Boston to Beijing - Gingerich uncovered a treasure trove of material on the life of a book and the evolution of an idea. His quest led him to copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scallywags, by musicians, movie stars, medicine men, and bibliomaniacs; some hiding in plain sight, others almost lost to time and the whims of politics and the black market. Part biography of a book and a man, part bibliographic and -philic quest, Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read is a captivating piece of writing, a testament to both the power of books and the power of the love of books.

Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University.