Subject: Re: [HM] Copernicus' Revolutionibi
From: Antreas P. Hatzipolakis (xpolakis@otenet.gr)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2000 - 11:57:34 EST
On Tue, 08 Feb 2000, Udai Venedem wrote:
> On Saturday feb. 5th, 2000, the Associated Press informed of the
> robbery of a Copernicus' Revolutionibus (1543). This happened at
> the library of the Academie des sciences de Saint-Petersbourg
> (Russia), and is only one of 23 other rare books from 16th and
> 17th century, which "disappeared" there. During the last two
> years, two other Revolutionibi were stolen, one in Poland, and
> the other in Ukrainia.
Interested members may read the following informative article by Keith Devlin:
Stealing Copernicus
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_3_00.html
Let me quote the first two paragraphs:
<quote>
The theft last month of a first edition copy of Nicolaus Copernicus's
classic text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ("On the revolution of the
heavenly spheres") was the seventh such disappearance of this valuable
work in recent years -- a chain of thefts that has left police from the
United States to the former Soviet Union doing what the missing texts say
the planets do around the sun: going round in circles. For De revolutionibus,
as it is more commonly known, was the book in which Copernicus first
presented the heliocentric model of the solar system. It is arguably the
first scientific text of the modern scientific era.
First published in 1543, there are 260 known copies still in existence from
the first-edition printing of (it is thought) about 500, currently worth up
to $400,000 each. All the major scientific figures who came after
Copernicus owned copies of the book (though not necessarily the first
edition), including Brahe, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and
Halley. In many cases they annotated their copy, thereby making it even
more valuable on today's rare-books market. (The original handwritten
version is kept at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, the
university where Copernicus received his education. You can view the
entire manuscript on their website:
http://www.bj.uj.edu.pl/bjmanus/revol/titlpg_e.html )
</quote>
Antreas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Mar 18 2000 - 19:08:50 EST