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London Review of Books

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J.L. Heilbron

  • The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich  Buy this book

Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read is an engaging account of a harmless obsession. For thirty years he has been ferreting out every copy of Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to which library catalogues, booksellers’ lists, auction records, informed tips and plain luck led him. The exceptional importance of Copernicus’s work in the history of science was only indirectly the cause of this monomania. The direct inspiration was a common sort of academic discomfort: being scheduled to speak at a large international meeting and having nothing particular to say.

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J.L. Heilbron is a professor of history and the vice chancellor, emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley; he is also a research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.