Author(s): Owen Gingerich

Travel Writing

1543 saw the publication of one of the most significant scientific works ever written: "De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)", in which Nicolaus Copernicus presented a radically different structure of the cosmos by placing the sun, and not the earth, at the centre of the universe.But did anyone take notice? - Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich was intrigued by the bold claim made by Arthur Koestler in his bestselling "The Sleepwalkers" that sixteenth-century Europe paid little attention to the groundbreaking, but dense, masterpiece. Gingerich embarked on a thirty-year odyssey to examine every extant copy to prove Koestler wrong...Logging thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of miles Gingerich uncovered a treasure trove of material on the life of a book and the evolution of an idea. His quest led him to copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scallywags, by musicians and movie stars; some easily accessible, others almost lost to time, politics and the black market.Part biography of a book and a man, part bibliographic and bibliophilic quest, Gingerich's "The Book Nobody Read" is an utterly captivating piece of writing, a testament to the power