Post by David Rinehart.

Do you remember when you learned that the planets in the solar system orbit the Sun? No? Yeah, me neither. It’s always been a fact of life for me. I’d say that for nearly all of us that is the case. I do recall when I learned that there was a time in which people thought the universe revolved around the Earth. The Geocentric theory. I cannot say exactly when I learned about this historical perspective of humanity’s place within the stars, but I suspect it was in primary school.

Do you remember who was responsible for this paradigmatic shift in thought where the heliocentric theory became as commonplace as the sky being blue? It was Copernicus. I’d say that while some of us may recall his name from memory, many of us at least recognize his name.
What if I told you that the very book in which the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus established the heliocentric theory is available as a second edition in our very own Russell Library?
Amazed, I wonder? Because I sure was! A unique aspect of working in a library with tens of thousands of books is that, contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually know every single book in the collection. You have catalogues and systems by which to maintain the collection and keep it safe. But it is nearly humanly impossible to know every single item within the library, especially only a year or two into the job. So, we rely on colleagues, especially scholars and researchers who come in to view the materials, to key us into the treasures we have on the shelves.

I remember perfectly the day in which one of our frequent readers, a history of maths researcher, came into the library to do some research on several mathematics and physics texts essential to the history of Mathematics, and brought out the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs). When he asked me to pull this book out, I did a double-take and asked him at least twice if we really had the very text Copernicus wrote to establish the heliocentric theory. Yes, indeed we did and do.
The text we hold is a second edition copy, printed in Basel in 1566. What’s more is that there are a known 277 copies of the first edition and a known 324 copies of the second edition in existence today, making this quite a gem.

We know this is a second edition for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, the second edition was printed in Basel by Henric Petrina. Evidence of this is found on the title page where we see the stunning printer’s mark unique to this Basel based printer with the text underneath, “BASᴁL, EX OFFICINA HENRICPETRINA”. Because we know that the second edition was printed by Henric Petrina, which is a different printer from the first and subsequent editions,
this text is indeed a second edition printed in 1566. Further, the printers also stamped the date of print, September of 1566, in the back of the book as well.

An interesting bit of debated history is the belief by storytellers of differing professions, myself included until very recently, that Copernicus was shunned by the Catholic Church for his ‘radical’ theory. However, many researchers have noted that this was not, in fact, the case. They state as evidence that Copernicus was devout to the church and in fact, the forward by Andreas Osiander, defending Copernicus’ work, was dedicated to the Pope at the time, Pope Paul III. Osiander states,
As you can see with this snippet of the forward, the theories and maths were presented with the utmost care to not be offensive or heretical. In fact, Osiander states that the heliocentric theory as it was presented was not to be believed as fact, but only as a tool for calculations until a better theory could fit in its place. This introduction of Copernican theories as purely hypothetical actually kept the book off the Index of Prohibited Books until the next century.
I would like to now shift your attention back to the book in question

to the stunning engraving on page 9, the diagram of the heavenly bodies, or what we now-a-days call planets and their orbits around the Sun. This diagram encapsulates a period of history in which there was a paradigmatic shift in which our understanding of our place in the cosmos dramatically changed.
To quote the amazing Dr. Elizabeth Boyle in an interview on the Library Treasures Podcast,
We fundamentally cannot get back into the mindset of a world before all of the things that have revolutionised our understanding of where the Earth sits in relation to the Solar System, the Universe – where humans sit in relation to evolution and so on. There have been fundamental shifts.