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"Clearly when Arthur Koestler wrote that De Revolutionibus was 'the book that nobody read' and 'an all time worst seller,' he couldn't have been more mistaken. He was wrong.
"Dead wrong."
As chance would have it, Gingerich, an astrophysicist and professor of history of science at Harvard University, had been chatting about that very passage from Arthur Koestler, only a few days before he had the opportunity to examine a copy of Copernicus' groundbreaking work. What he found surprised and fascinated him and got him thinking. The work was heavily annotated, not just in the initial portion where Copernicus sets forth his heliocentric cosmology (Earth goes around the Sun, rather than the biblical everything goes around the Earth), but all the way through right to the very end, encompassing a rather technical exegesis of orbital calculations.
Well, obviously at least one person had read De Revolutionibus, and quite carefully at that. What would an examination of other copies reveal? How many copies had survived the intervening 480 years? And as far as that went, how many copies had there been to begin with? And of course, where were the books and to whom had they belonged? The fact that there was no comprehensive census of this particular volume did not make the task any easier. This fascinating, well-written and readable memoir, written after Gingerich's inventory of all the 1st and 2nd editions of Copernicus' classic was completed and published, is an adventure in the history of science in the 16th century which took Gingerich far afield, to rare book libraries and private collections all over the world. By 1620 copies of De Revolutionibus, both censored and uncensored, were strewn across the map of Europe. Just waiting to be marked up, bought and sold, microfilmed and studied, and naturally, purloined.
The Book Nobody Read is enriched by maps and drawings, and by photographs taken by the author and Charles Eames, who accompanied him to Poland and Sweden for photo shoots, and with whom he collaborated in his Venice (CA) studio on a Copernican Revolution exhibit sponsored by IBM.
You might check out Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill's stint as Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration. The substance of this book hasn't received the press it deserves. For example, the account of the very first Bush Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, ten days after the Bush inauguration, is quite instructive. In what some present see as a scripted exchange, Bush and Rice shift the focus to Iraq. 'He turned to Rice. "So, Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?"
"How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President," Rice said.
'On Book Design' is a large book, yet comfortable to hold open in one hand. Its text is effortless to read, a model of legibility. These facts reinforce another essential fact about the book: if you're interested in book design, what Richard Hendel has to say commands attention. His book design is overall a complete success and therefore so is his book.
But if you ARE interested in typography, especially in the context of books, then On Book Design [buy at amazon] . by Richard Hendel, could be for you. And the best part is, it's not all by him. He has rounded up a bunch of other book designers to talk about how they view book design. How they view it, and how they do it. Actually, so much of the book is written by these eight people that I wonder how Richard Hendel got away with being the sole author: David Bullen, Ron Costley, Richard Eckersley, Sandra Strother Hudson, Mary Mendell, Anita Walker Scott, Humphrey Stone and Virginia Tan contribute well-considered and well-expressed views on their own approach to book design.