I was just reading Owen Gingrich’s fascinating The Book Nobody Read (Penguin) this morning while having hot-cakes with my family for breakfast. Gingrich, an astronomer and historian of science, writes in this elegantly styled, 310 pages book, about his adventures tracking down extant copies of the first two editions of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus–the book that originally set out the mathematics behind our modern conception of the solar system. On page 64, in an almost off-hand manner, Gingrich says, in part,

“…Having by then [1973] examined more than a hundred copies, surely sufficient for statistical purposes, I was tempted to say that enough was enough. Nevertheless, Rome beckoned, because I knew there were more unexamined Copernicus imprints in that metropolis than in any other single place. Copies were found in the Biblioteca Nazionale, in the Accademia dei Lincei, at the Vatican, and in the Biblioteca Casanatense. The latter library, named after Cardinal Casanate, who later became head of the Inquisition that had sentenced Giordano Bruno to the stake in 1600, unexpectedly turned out to have Bruno’s De revolutionibus, a second edition. Bruno had been sentenced as a heretic for a plethora of heterodox ideas, including the plurality of worlds, but he seemed at best rather ill informed about Copernicus’ ideas. His De revolutionibus contained a bold signature but no evidence that he had actually read the book….”