The Jeffersonian Provenance of the University of Virginia Copy of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus: Addendum to Gingerich

Abstract

I his 2002 book An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566), Owen Gingerich concludes that the provenance of the University of Virginia’s copy—the second edition, printed in Basel in 1566 —is indeterminate. Gingerich suggests that the volume “might be a replacement” for the original copy ordered by Thomas Jefferson, presumed lost in a fi re that destroyed much of the university’s library in the Rotunda on October 27, 1895 (351). In a subsequent account, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (2004), Gingerich revisits the provenance of the Virginia Copernicus and reaches a similar verdict: “Because many of the volumes of the library were destroyed by fi re in 1895, it is now impossible to know whether the copy is the original one or a replacement” (247). My ongoing investigation into historical shelf marks and original bindings extant in the University of Virginia library reveals that the recovery of the provenance of the Virginia Copernicus is far from impossible; in fact, Gingerich’s Census records some of the evidence useful in establishing its Jeffersonian origin. Jefferson’s manuscript desiderata for the university library confi rm that a copy of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus was on order in 1825.1 This list also reveals that Jefferson did not specify an edition of the work, leaving the date and place of publication blank. We know, however, that a copy of the second edition of De Revolutionibus was added to the collection between 1825 and 1827, because it appears in the earliest printed catalogue of the library (1828).2 Presumably, this is the same copy recorded in a later manuscript catalogue, begun in 1857 and in use until about 1905.3 These three early lists and catalogues—Jefferson’s of 1825, the printed catalogue of 1828, and the manuscript catalogue of circa 1857—attest to the presence of a copy of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the university library from its founding; the question is, was it the same copy held currently in the University of Virginia’s Special Collections Library?