Translation: First report to Johann Schöner on the Books of the Revolutions of the learned gentleman and distinguished mathematician, the Reverend Doctor Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun, Canon of Warmia, by a certain youth devoted to mathematics. -- Rheticus
$1.5 million buys book that put world in its placeBy ERIC ADLER
The $1.5 million book is tucked inside its own protective case, sitting on a shelf in a huge vault with a steel door 5 inches thick.
It is the rarest and most expensive book the Linda Hall Library of Science has ever bought. Carefully, Bruce Bradley, the library's curator of rare books, picked up the case and carried it into an adjoining room rich with the dark wood paneling of a grand English library.
He picked up a pair of white cotton gloves, slipped them on and opened the case. Gently, he removed a thin volume weighing a few ounces and placed it on a flat wood table. The book is 464 years old.
"Doesn't look like such a big deal, does it?" Bradley said.
Except, of course, that it helped change the world.
Published in Latin in 1540, the book is one of the few remaining first editions of the Narratio prima by German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus.
Three years before famed astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus, the revolutionary treatise stating that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of the universe, Rheticus published Narratio prima.
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Posted by Vanderleun at April 25, 2004 8:03 PM