Not so long ago, the Vernadsky Academic Reference Library suffered an excruciating loss. Someone broke in and stole Nicolaus Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in Nuremberg in 1543. The book is in Latin and supplemented with charts and drawings in the author’s own hand. According to the library director, Oleksiy Myshchenko, this book belonged to an aristocratic gymnasium high school in Kyiv in the early nineteenth century and was later donated to Kyiv University. Since 1927 it had been kept at the Vernadsky Library.
Apparently the theft was a contract job. Ms. Mukha, head of the incunabula section, says the malefactor, presumably a man aged around 30, came posing as a regular customer but she noticed that he did not know how to use index cards and did not seem to understand Latin. The stolen book may have been transferred to the "customer" by now, likely to appear at an auction somewhere in the CIS or abroad. The Day thought proper to carry this photo showing the book's title page and wish the investing authorities success, reports Klara Gudzyk.







