Treasures of Astronomy

I just finished reading Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Professor Gingerich, senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard, spent decades tracking down every known copy of Copernicus' famous book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex. It was in De revolutionibus that Copernicus proposed the heretical theory that the planets - including the Earth - orbit the Sun. The reigning paradigm had been one in which everything orbited the Earth.

The stories of Professor Gingerich's scientific detective work to find the just-over-600 known copies around the world are fascinating. One has to admire not only his scholarship but his tenacity.

When I saw this book in the bookstore I was drawn to it because of some personal circumstances. Several years ago I was helping a friend clean out his father’s basement. Paul said to take anything I wanted, as it was all going in the trash. There were a number of books, most of them of no interest. But one caught my eye. It was very old, and the cover was not in good shape. The title page was missing as well. The book was written entirely in German but I was able to tell that the author's foreword was dated March 25, 1777. What was most interesting were the tipped-in star charts in the back of this small book. There is one for each month of the year, with the constellations artistically depicted. There is also one showing the orbits of the planets and one showing the face of the moon.

I couldn’t take the book – not when I suspected it might be worth something. But I did some research and discovered that the book is Johann Elert Bode’s Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels. I believe because of the date of Bode’s foreword that this is probably the third edition, as the second edition came out in 1772. Subsequently I bought the book from Paul’s father and because of its condition I had it rebound. As far as I can tell it’s not particularly valuable, but the way in which I found the book, and the artwork in the charts, is enough to make me value the book highly.