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OWEN GINGERICH, An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566). Studia Copernicana - Brill's Series, 2. Leiden, Boston, MA and Koln: Brill, 2002. Pp. xxxi + 402. ISBN 90-04-11466-1. $132.00, euro113.00 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087404236688
The book under review is a labour of love, for the author has devoted some thirty years to tracking down the surviving copies of the first two editions of Copernicus's De revolutionibus. The result is a detailed description of 277 copies of the first edition and 324 of the second, some in private hands but most of them deposited in public collections. The reader might well ask what useful information could possibly justify such an enormous effort. The answer, which may come as a surprise, is that many copies are heavily annotated by distinguished scholars of the sixteenth century (and later), and some of these annotations appear in multiple copies. In effect, annotations were a form of scientific communication in the age between the invention of printing and the introduction of the scientific journal in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The most significant families of annotations stem from Erasmus Reinhold (d. 1553), a leading astronomer at Wittenberg in the generation after Copernicus (d. 1543); and from Paul Wittich...