He called the hunt “exciting and laborious” and, like Dr. They estimate that the book’s first edition consisted of some 600 and possibly as many as 750 copies - hundreds more than the 250 or so that historians had previously assumed. The goal now, he added, is to “alert librarians and private owners to the census in hope to receive information regarding other unknown copies.”įirst editions of the Principia, the scholars say, today sell for between $300,000 and $3,000,000 on the black market and at auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. “We decided to publish our census as a means to reinvigorate the project,” Dr. The scholars hope that their search, which they call preliminary, will produce new clues about other copies tucked away in libraries, as well as with book dealers and private owners. “Copies differ in their binding, condition, size, annotations, printing differences and even scent.” “Each copy that I have examined is unique,” he reported. Svorencík said, the long hunt gave him the opportunity to personally inspect a number of the extremely rare books. The finding pointed to “substantial gaps in the existing record.”Įven so, Dr. “The previous census reported only three German copies, but I found nearly 20,” he said. Perhaps the most significant book in the history of science, it describes Newtons threory of universal gravitation which put the new discoveries of Copernicus. Svorencík said a big surprise came early in the hunt during his sweep through Germany.

A bookseller in Italy was discovered to possess a copy stolen from a library in Germany half a century earlier. Over a dozen years, their endeavor turned up some 200 previously unidentified copies in 27 countries, including 35 in Central Europe. Feingold then suggested they turn his project into a systematic search for first editions. Svorencík’s surprise, he found many copies. “This is understandable as the census was done after the Iron Curtain descended, which made tracing copies very difficult.” “The census done in the 1950s did not list any copies from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland or Hungary,” he recalled. His main question was whether first editions could be traced to his native country. Svorencík grew up in Slovakia and wrote in his Caltech paper about the Principia’s distribution in Central Europe - in particular, the Hapsburg Empire. The student received a master’s degree from Caltech in 2008.ĭr. Svorencík said the hunt had its origin in a paper he wrote for Dr. In a Caltech report on the discovery, Dr.

Principia mathematica newton