Saturday Rave: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus.

 What do you do if you want as few people as possible to read the book you've written?

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Polish astronomer who came up with a revolutionary theory about the structure of the solar system. Copernicus had discovered (following the word of the thirteenth century scholar Mur'ayyad al-Din al-'Urdi) that the Earth went round the Sun, and not the Sun round the Earth. This idea, inconveniently, contradicts the Bible (Joshua 10:3), and Copernicus was fairly sure it was going to upset all manner of powerful Christian folk (and he was right: both Martin Luther and the Catholic Church hated it). 

Copernicus's book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in 1543, and Copernicus succeeded in his ambition to the extent that Arthur Koestler described it as the book that nobody read.

So how was the reverse-publicity for the book managed?

The boldest move was dedicating the book to the pope (so it must be all right, yes?). There were also two other precautionary measures: one was that there was a preface explaining that the book was just an aid to astronomical calculation and not intended to be an expression of the actual truth; the other was that it was deliberately written in a very boring and technical way that only an astronomer was going to be able to understand. (In fact a lot of astronomers did read it, but they mostly treated it (or pretended to treat it) as just that - an aid to calculation - and tactfully glossed over the great revolution in thought Copernicus was presenting.)

The Catholic Church did eventually catch on that the book was what they called blasphemous, and it was withdrawn from circulation only seventy three years after publication. A 'corrected' version was prepared but never published, and in fact Pope Benedict IV removed the ban in 1758.

It's still the case that very few people have read De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, but its fame resounds.

And it's hard, after all,  to regard Copernicus's reverse-publicity campaign as a failure.

Word To Use Today: publicity. This word comes from the Latin word pōplicus, which means of the people.