Copernicus & Mallock: Two Bizarre Books

[Owen Gingerich: The Book Nobody Read (2004)]

[Tom Phillips: A Humument (1980 / 2012)]

Sometime around noon on the 5th of November, 1966, the artist Tom Phillips was poking around an old warehouse in London, looking for bargain books:

When we arrived at the racks of cheap and dusty books left over from house clearances I boasted to Ron [Kitaj] that if I took the first one that cost threepence I could make it serve a serious long-term project. My eye quickly chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we found it had the fateful price. 'If it's a dime,' said Ron, 'then that's your book: and I'm your witness.' ['Notes on A Humument,' p.370]

45 years and five editions later, A Humument stands as a curious monument to human ingenuity. "Energy worthy of a better cause," as my father might say. Or energy very sensibly employed, perhaps? Who can say ...

Phillips does goes out of his way to mention the interesting fact that the warehouse stood on "Peckham Rye, where William Blake saw his first angels", and it was (of course) Blake who once reminded us that energy is "eternal delight."

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Sometime in October 1970, Historians of Science Jerry Ravetz and Owen Gingerich asked themselves whether (at the time or since) anyone had actually read Nicolaus Copernicus's ground-breaking text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex [Six books on the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres] (1543). The question was prompted by the rather bad review Arthur Koestler gave the book in his 1959 classic The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Koestler referred to Copernicus's book as an "all time worst seller" and "the book that nobody read." But was he right?

How can you actually tell if anyone read a book or not? A simple name on the fly-leaf is insufficient. I have lots of books in my collection which I've never read. Some of them are reference books which it's useful to have but which I'll never read cover to cover - others I'm been meaning to get to but haven't yet done so.

Nor is quoting from the book any kind of irrefutable proof. Plenty of people read the summaries and advertising copy for Copernicus's book, but did the do more than dip into its somewhat forbidding contents?

The answer (according to Gingerich) is marginal annotations. His conversation in York that Saturday evening in 1970 prompted him to look up a copy of the first edition at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. It turned out to be annotated from beginning to end, and thus suggested the interesting counter-question:

If it was read so rarely, why was the very next copy I chanced upon so full of evidence of a most perceptive reader, who had marked innumerable errors and who had worked his way through to the very end, even past the obscure material on planetary latitudes that brought up the rear of the four hundred page volume? [The Book Nobody Read, p.422]

And so began on what the blurb to his book calls "a thirty-year odyssey to examine every one of the hundreds of surviving copies of the original in order to prove [Koestler] wrong."

Once again, it sounds a rather unlikely way of spending one's time - fantastically arduous and demanding an almost insane level of precision in recording every detail of every copy (labour which eventually resulted in An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), to which The Book Nobody Read is a rather more lighthearted companion volume).

Along the way, Gingerich discovered a huge amount about the sixteenth-century scholarly networks, transcending religion and politics, which united the astronomers and mathematicians of the age, and which enabled them to copy and supplement each other's notes in the margins of copy after copy of De revolutionibus. Koestler's rather flippant and dismissive remark was proved not only to be "dead wrong" (as Gingerich puts it), but to mask a whole complex of fascinating (and hitherto undreamt-of) connections.

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[The Book Nobody Read]

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

1. Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. 2004. Arrow Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2005.
2. Rosen, Edward, trans. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus / The Letter against Werner / The Narratio Prima of Rheticus. Second Edition, Revised with an Annotated Copernicus Bibliography, 1939-1958. 1939. New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
3. Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
4. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. 1959. Introduction by Herbert Butterfield. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1972.

[A Humument]

Tom Phillips (1937- )

1. Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 1980. Fifth Edition. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2012.

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So what's my point in comparing these two projects? They both seem to have occupied roughly the same period of time: forty-odd years for Phillips, thirty-odd years for Gingerich. Both have as their central object the illumination / elucidation of a single book: in Gingerich's case a (famously unreadable) scientific classic, in Phillip's a (not very widely read) Victorian novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892).

Of course in the one case Gingerich's labours could be said to have cast light on an obscure sector of intellectual history; whereas Phillips' indefatigable cutting and pasting and colouring casts light on nothing except the strange workings of his own mind.

Or do they? Surely the mere popularity of Phillips's book - in contradistinction to Mallock's, which failed miserably to equal the success of his earlier satirical novel The New Republic (1877) - tells us something about the spirit of our own age, our postmodern distrust of the sanctity of the text, our singular dedication to game-playing and chaos?

Both projects are equally crazy. I guess that's what I'd like to suggest to you. I know that Gingerich's comes accompanied with all the panoply of "hard" science - the graphs, the tables of analysis, the famous names of the past - but then Phillips doesn't lack those scholarly trappings either. The fascinating notes on his project reprinted at the back of his book refer to it as "'a Gesamtkunstwerk in small format'", though a "full Variorum Edition may remain a dream (or a posthumous project) since the wheel is still turning and the odd spark still flies off" [p.383].

Both books, Phillips' and Gingerich's, are in fact "Human Documents" of the most fascinating kind: they show the unexpected consequences of immersion in virtually any product of the human imagination. The fact that they're both consecrated to particular copies of a single book doe tend to endear them to bibliophiles such as myself, but one can easily see how the principle could be extended.

In his lifetime, as the caricature below suggests, Mallock had a hard time reconciling the conflicting claims of religion and science. it's hard to know if he would have been pleased to see one of his novels at the centre of so arbitrary an embellishment as A Humument, but I doubt that he would have failed to see the point. If we can have no clear idea in advance of the end results of our investigations, then it doesn't pay to reject any possible line of enquiry out-of-hand. This applies to Phillips' work every bit as much as Gingerich's.

['Spy': Is life worth living? (Vanity Fair, 1882)]

True, one might call Copernicus an intellectual giant, Mallock a dwarf, but it's salutary to remember that - during their respective lifetimes - the opposite was the case. Mallock was widely read and well regarded, while - to those very few who had heard of him - Copernicus was known only as an obscure cleric in a small town on Poland's Baltic coast, who exhibited the strange quirk of devoting his spare time to celestial mechanics.

One book I found lurking in the back of a second-hand shop in Whangarei; the other was lent to me by inveterate poet and text-experimenter Richard Taylor. I leave it to you to guess which was which.

[Nicolaus Copernicus (Toruń, 1580)]

Oh, and last but not least: a Happy New Year to you all ...

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Finds: Thoroughly Munted

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. 1913. Trans. Anne Hyde Greet.
Foreword by Warren Ramsey. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

It's funny when you go snooping around in the ripped old paperbacks in the back of a bookshop (in this case, Jason Books on High Street, long before it came up in the world and went boutique). You see something there which hardly even seems to merit picking up - in this case a backless wodge of papers with a pasted spine and no title-page - which turns out to be one of the finds of your life.

I see from the inscription above that it was on the 5th September, 1979, some 30-odd years ago, and the book in question was Apollinaire's Alcools - or, rather, a complete dual-text translation of the same, which some iconoclast had ripped apart and then deposited among the other trash to be pulped. A price of 15 cents hardly seemed exorbitant even at the time, especially when I think of the amount of time I've spent leafing through those pages, reading and rereading those amazing poems: "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" - above all, "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé":

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

More than a half-century has passed since the manuscript beginning with these lines was fished out of limbo, read and read again, and a dazzled magazine editor called across the room that here, at last, was a first-rate poem. A reader of the sixties might find other terms in which to express his approval, though some of Paul Léautaud's are still serviceable: "I read, read twice, three times, was carried away, dazed, delighted, deeply moved. Such melancholy, such evocative tone, such bohemianism, such rangings of the mind, and that faintly gypsy air and the total absence of that abomination of ordinary verse, la rime riche ... "

- Warren Ramsay, "Foreword"

I'm glad that that front page of the foreword hadn't gone the way of the title-page and all the other prelims (including the copyright page). That idea of an editor picking up the poem for the first time, reading it, and immediately recognising genius was, I suspect, the main reason I persevered through all the strange pages of Apollinaire's book. I'd never read poetry like this, had no frame of reference to set it in - for a while, it seemed to me as if I'd never read poetry at all before this, my discovery of the Modern.

Even as first published in that distant spring of 1909 (when it lacked two stanzas of the Zaparogian Cossacks' horrendous letter and, unlike the more characteristic final version, was punctuated), "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" has the authority of the more mature Apollinaire, the vibrancy of a modern poet speaking in his own voice ...

I don't quite know why anyone would take what must have been a fairly new book (Anne Hyde Greet's version of Alcools was published in 1966, a mere ten years before I found it in those back shelves in Auckland) and dismember it like that. Had the poet displeased them somehow? Perhaps that word scrawled on the back cover holds some clue, like the "CROATOAN" found carved on a tree by the lost settlers of Roanoke Island: "scenarios", it appears to read. But what scenarios, when and where?

I doubt I'll ever know.

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Arthur Koestler. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937.
Abridged ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY ARTHUR KOESTLER
TRANSLATED BY TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

On February 8th, 1937, six months after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, the troops of General Franco entered Malaga. The author, then a war correspondent for an English Liberal newspaper, had remained in the besieged town after its evacuation by the Republican army. On the day after the entry of the conquering troops, he was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. For four months he was kept in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of his fellow prisoners and awaiting his own. He kept a diary in his cell, which he succeeded in smuggling out when released; this diary forms the main part of Dialogue with Death.

Under pressure of world-wide protests General Franco agreed that Koestler should be exchanged for a prisoner of the Republican Government. He was released in May 1937. Dialogue with Death was first published in January 1938, as the second part of Spanish Testament. The original edition, with an introduction by the Duchess of Atholl, contained a number of chapters dealing with political and military aspects of the Civil War, which was then still in progress. Since then it has become, in the words of the New Statesman and Nation, a book "which should rank among British classics."

This rather scruffy looking Penguin I found in the shelves of an old second-hand furniture shop which used to nestle in the heart of the Mairangi Bay CBD, between Max Paterson's stationers and the greengrocer's shop. It was run by a lady called Ruth Thorne, who maintained a couple of bays full of battered books at bargain prices.

This one probably set me back ten or twenty cents, in July 1979, a couple of months before I bought the Apollinaire. It had an almost equally great influence on me, though.

Those 1940s Penguins seem so strange and exotic to us now, but it's worth remembering that they just looked junky at the time. It was the content of the book that interested me, the strange intense account that Koestler gave of his experiences in a death-cell during the Spanish Civil War. I'd already read his classic novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, at the recommendation of our Russian teacher, Eddie Meijers, but it was this coverless paperback which had the stronger effect on me, I think. Something about the way he wrote was so vivid and immediate - I guess I've been trying to find something like it ever since.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Translated by
TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

PENGUIN BOOKS
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND
300 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A.

Published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Abridged edition published in Penguin Books Feb. 1942
Reprinted in Penguin Books March 1943

FOREWORD

NONE of the characters in this book is fictitious; most of them are dead by now.

To die - even in the service of an impersonal cause - is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was almost inevitable that these pages, written for the most part, in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character. There are, in the author's opinion, two reasons which justify their publication.

In the first place, the things which go on inside a condemned man's head have a certain psychological interest. Professional writers have rarely had an opportunity of studying these processes in the first person singular. I have tried to present them as frankly and concisely as I could. The main difficulty was the temptation to cut a good figure; I hope that the reader will agree that I have succeeded in overcoming this.

In the second place, I believe that wars, in particular civil wars, consist of only ten per cent action and of ninety per cent passive suffering. Thus this account of the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries may perhaps bring closer to the reader the nature of Civil War than descriptions of battles.

I dedicate it to my friend Nicolas, an obscure little soldier of the Spanish Republic, who on April 14th, 1937, on the sixth birthday of that Republic, was shot dead in the prison of Seville.

A.K.

THE AUTHOR

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, a Hungarian subject, and studied engineering and psychology respectively at the Technische Hoschschule and the University of Vienna. He became a journalist at the age of 21,lived as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Moscow, travelled in Soviet Central Asia and in the Arctic on board the Graf Zeppelin. While correspondent of the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by General Franco's troops and was imprisoned for having denounced, in the British Press, German and Italian intervention on the Nationalist side.

In 1938 he abandoned journalism to take up novel-writing. His works include The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon (fiction), Scum of the Earth, which relates the author's experiences during the French collapse, and Spanish Testament, of which Dialogue with Death is an improved version. Koestler is now serving as a private in the British Army.

Of course the word "abridged" always acts on me like a red rag on a bull. I always want the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

As I read more about Koestler, though, I began to understand the curious politics behind these various versions of his Spanish civil war memoir, the strange fusion of communists propaganda and personal testimony in the original version (which I found some years later in a pile of old Gollancz Left Book Club editions:

Koestler, Arthur. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.

Eventually I even discovered a third version of the book, from the "Danube Edition" of his collected works, which began to appear in the 1960s. There's something about that battered old Penguin that seems almost to embody history for me, though.

The fact that it had been printed a mere six years after the events described in it gave me a powerful sense of their reality, their tangible weight and gravity.

I've never been able to ignore those ripped and munted books at the backs of bookshops ever since. How can you know what treasures might be sitting there, glowing radioactive in the dark?

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed., 1942. Rev. Danube ed., 1966. London: Papermac, 1983.