Rare Copernicus Books Lost to Thieves Worldwide

Copies of one of the world’s rarest and most valuable books have been disappearing--a rash of mysterious thefts that have perplexed police from the former Soviet Union to the United States.

The first-edition copies of 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ renowned treatise in Latin, “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), have vanished from collections across the globe.

In Poland, a reader said he had to use the bathroom--and made off with the treasured volume. A thief in Kiev, Ukraine, pilfered the book using a fake police ID. The latest theft of the book, published in 1543 and valued at up to $400,000, was discovered earlier this month in Russia.

Russian police say they have appealed to Interpol for help in locating that book, which disappeared from the Academy of Sciences Library in St. Petersburg. Police would give no further details.

At least seven of the 260 known copies of the 1543 edition of “De revolutionibus” have disappeared in recent years, including one copy each from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, according to Owen Gingerich, a professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Five copies remain missing.

Some police have speculated that a ring of thieves and collectors is behind the rash of thefts or that the books may have been stolen on some collectors’ orders.

However, Gingerich says there is no evidence to suggest an international conspiracy to steal copies of the treatise, which describes Copernicus’ then-revolutionary theory that the sun, not Earth, was at the center of the universe.

Gingerich has worked for a quarter-century compiling a list of all known copies of the first and second editions of the work, a quest that has taken him to cities and libraries worldwide--and has helped him trace at least two stolen copies.

While the book is a tempting target for thieves because of its value, it’s also “a very dangerous title to steal,” Gingerich said in an Internet interview, noting that his census can help identify any known copy, making it risky to try to sell a stolen copy at auction or on the international antique market.

Still, the disappearances continue.

The theft in Poland occurred in November 1998 at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ library in Krakow, where a man in his 40s asked to read a first-edition copy of “De Revolutionibus” valued at $320,000.

Sometime later, the reader said he had to visit the toilet--and disappeared. He left behind his belongings and the book’s covers, said Krakow’s deputy police head Eugeniusz Szczerbak.

Three months earlier, a man walked out of the Ukrainian National Library in Kiev carrying a first-edition Copernicus. The thief had an apparently fake police ID and appeared to be well acquainted with the library’s security arrangements.

Librarians said he requested six books, including the Copernicus. He then returned the books to secure a receipt, took a break and came back to request more books, including the Copernicus. The man vanished with the rare book just before closing time, apparently showing the guard the initial receipt to prove he had returned it.

Gingerich has helped trace at least two stolen copies. One copy that surfaced on the book market in 1997 came from the Brno University Library in the Czech Republic. It had been returned by the library, which kept the book during Communist times, to the original owner, an Augustinian monastery, from which it disappeared.

Another edition, which turned up in Germany, had come from the Pulkovo Observatory Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, Gingerich said.

The library “suffered a disastrous arson fire . . . and apparently someone thought that the inventory of the library was now so incomplete that a missing book would be presumed lost in the fire,” he said.