Around the World in 30 Years

Walking into the office of Astronomy professor Owen J. Gingerich, you may want to double check to make sure you’ve found the right place. More a book collector’s sanctum than an office, Gingerich’s bookshelves are crowded with ancient, valuable books and tchotchkes. But despite the wealth of knowledge that pervades the room, one particular item truly stands out among the rest—a brown paper bag filled with a raisin-bread ham sandwich from Whole Foods Market: Gingerich’s daily lunch.

Gingerich smirks, unable to contain a child-like grin. “So, why’d I get chosen for an interview?”

At ease in his herringbone blazer, grey slacks, and worn, black dress shoes, Gingerich, at first glance, blends in well with the otherwise undecorated walls of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But one need only look into his eyes to discover a man of zeal—not just an academic, but also an investigator with a genuine vigor for the history of astronomy.

Gingerich first began collecting tables containing star positions–called ephemerides–after a professor researching a poem by John Skelton called to ask him about the position of stars in the sky.

“Looking carefully at the poem, it was very wonderfully the case that you could date it,” Gingerich says. “There were just enough hints, half of which had been ignored by the Skelton experts earlier and didn’t get hung up on all his little details.”

And that’s what he does best: get hung up on the details. It was his investigation into this poem that caused him to wonder, “How accurate were ephemerides at the time of Columbus?” So he acquired more of the tables until he had amassed the world’s largest collection from 1460 up until 1600. “So you ask how I got into collecting…” he trails off, laughing.

When asked to put his interest into words, Gingerich falters, unable to assign over 30 years of work one single motive. His magnum opus, “The Book Nobody Read,” was originally meant to be a simple contradiction of Arthur Koestler, a scholar who claimed that nearly no one contemporaneous with Copernicus read his revolutionary work on the heliocentric model (De Revolutionibus). Upon discovering a first-edition copy of De Revolutionibus in the Edinburgh observatory, he noticed that it was full of annotations in the margins. Gingerich says, “And it was plain that here was somebody who had interest in the book.” This “someone” turned out to be Erasmus Reinhold, a prominent astronomy teacher in the 1500s.

Thinking that this teacher probably shared his copy of Copernicus with his students, Gingerich decided to look at a few other copies of De Revolutionibus—maybe a 100-copy survey, just to be safe. But this project ended up being more than he originally bargained for. The marginalia from one edition of the book launched an adventure around the globe to seek out more than 600 copies of De Revolutionibus.

After seeing his 100th copy of the Copernicus volume, Gingerich received an offer he couldn’t refuse: a chance to go to the Vatican and see their edition. To his surprise, the Vatican copy also had Reinhold’s annotations—the same ones he saw in the Edinburgh observatory.

“And I realized, not just then, it was really just stamping it, that there was a fair amount of readership and it was indicated by people having identical notes, and they were copying from each other and their teachers,” Gingerich says. His studies revealed a network of scholarship that surrounded the work previously thought to have only been read by “about 10 people.”

When asked which of the books lining his office walls are most valuable, he replies, “I’ve never worked it out that way.” Predictably, most of his collection correlates with his deep interest in the lives and work of Copernicus and Kepler. Even one of the few non-scientific books he has still maintains a strong connection to his penchant for Copernican artifacts: a Hebrew Bible printed by the same publisher as De Revolutionibus. Gingerich takes great pride, however, in the variety of his collection–everything from pamphlets signed by John Dee, to thousand-page records of astronomical data before 2000 BC, to a Eurypterus remipies fossil.

When asked to sum up the composition of his collection, Gingerich pauses for a brief moment, scanning through the catalog of his library, only contained in his brain. He smiles.

“So you’re sort of asking what kind of things do I have? Well…. all sorts, really!”