22 17th December 2011 antiquarian books New prices for works that
■ Far-seeing publications that looked at the universe anew
Ian McKay reports
WITHIN just 48 hours two 16th century astronomical texts that challenged and threatened the firmly held scientific and religious beliefs of past centuries raised almost £1.3m between them, including premiums. These two sales – one in Copenhagen the other in London – provide the highspots but not the only innovative works in this review of recent scientific sales.
De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium
by Nicolaus Copernicus is described in that masterful and indispensible reference, Printing and the Mind of Man, as a landmark in human thought and the work that heralded the birth of heliocentralism and changing our view of the universe forever. In Heralds of Science, another celebrated exhibition catalogue – this time of books in the Dibner Library at the Smithsonian – it is cited as “the earliest of the three books of science that most clarified the relationship of man and his universe”. The other ‘Heralds’ so distinguished
are Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – a copy of which also features in this report. For centuries both western and
Arab astronomers had held fast to the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian teachings
Left: a woodcut from the 1543, first edition of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium sold by Sotheby’s for £700,000, showing the planets in orbit around the sun, and at the outer ring, the ‘Stellarium Fixarum Iphaera Immobilis’.
Right: a page from the very rare copy of Tycho Brahe’s De Nova Stella sold by Bruun Rasmussen for Dkr 4.1m (£472,730). In the drawing he made to show the new star (fig. I at top left of the woodcut seen here), Brahe identifies the stars of the constellation by reference to the features of the traditional star sign image of Cassiopeia seated in her chair, but within a few decades Johann Bayer had introduced the practice of identifying each star of a constellation with a letter of the Greek alphabet.
that put the earth at the centre of the universe, even as increasingly refined mathematical calculations, tabulations and more detailed and accurate observations undermined these long-held theories and made proofs increasingly difficult. Moreover, belief in a divinely and thus
perfectly created universe – common to both Christian and Muslim worlds – meant that challenging traditional views of the cosmos had potentially troublesome theological implications. Copernicus’ book showed that the
movement of the planets (the wanderers) could be more easily explained if it was accepted that they revolved around the Sun, not the Earth, with Mercury, the swiftest moving planet, nearest to the Sun and Saturn, the slowest moving, furthest away – the others fitting in where the duration of their orbit placed them. Copernicus’ heliocentric ideas had
first been circulated in manuscript form among colleagues, but then he was
persuaded to allow the mathematician and astronomer Georg Joachim Rheticus to publish a summary of his heliocentric ideas in 1540. Three years later, the complete De Revolutionibus... was published in Nuremburg. Its repercussions were immediately
recognised, and the threat of a violent reaction by the church had even been recognised in the unsigned preface by the theologian Osiander, whose placatory address to the reader stated that it presented merely hypotheses which “need not be true or even probable; if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is sufficient”. Rheticus and others (including, at a
later date, Kepler) denounced Osiander’s preface as reprehensible, but Copernicus, who only saw a completed copy on the eve of his death, escaped all the arguments that followed. That the universe was not immutable
was later demonstrated by Tycho Brahe (see below) and Galileo, and the idea of
“Copies of De Revolutionibus are scarce; only five have come to auction this century.”
heliocentricism and an infinite universe came to be accepted and discussed. This inevitably led to the work being condemned as heretical by Rome in 1616 – but not officially, in part because its observations were essential to reform of the calendar and the precise determination of Easter. Only one copy of the Rheticus work
of 1540 has appeared at auction in over 50 years – the ex-Honeyman copy that in 1980 sold for £75,000 at Sotheby’s and nine years later, as part of ‘The Garden’ library sale at Sotheby’s New York, reached $430,000 (then £272,150). Copies of De Revolutionibus are also
scarce; only five have come to auction this century. The copy offered by Sotheby’s on
November 30, which came from Joost R. Ritman’s great private library and study centre in Amsterdam, the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, showed some marginal dampstaining at the beginning
Above: Wiliam Smith‘s Geological Section from London to Snowdon... of 1817, sold for £9600 by Dominic Winter.
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