You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Even more important than Mercator, though, was one of his friends. Abraham Ortelius—known in his native Dutch as Ortels—was born in Antwerp in 1528, and although he traveled throughout Europe, he always returned to the city of his birth. Antwerp was a perfect base for a sixteenth-century geographer. Now in Belgium, it was then part of the Seventeen Provinces, ruled by Habsburg Spain. When Ortelius was born it was a city of ninety thousand people and an intellectual hub, with the Plantijn printing house based there and the great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus in nearby Rotterdam. It was an artistic as well as an intellectual center, and some of the greatest artists of the day—Titian, Tintoretto, Bruegel—were active in the area. Most important for Ortelius, though, was Antwerp’s place at the center of the administration of a great commercial empire. Some of the biggest businesses in sixteenth-century Antwerp were the trade in sugar, pepper, and cinnamon, with imports coming from the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the New World. Every day hundreds of oceangoing vessels docked in Antwerp. The trade in luxury goods from the empire poured money into the city, which became one of the largest in Europe, and one of the richest—according to historian Fernand Braudel, “the centre of the entire international economy.”4

  This is the vantage point from which the great mapmaker saw the world. Ortelius took a job around 1547 as an engraver, reproducing others’ maps in print, and then as a map illuminator, hand-coloring engraved maps and mounting them on linen backing. Cartography was getting a boost from a new technology, as the old carved woodblocks were giving way to engraved copperplates, producing at least three benefits: maps could show much more detail; the plates could be kept and revised as necessary; and they could make many more impressions, leading to more copies at a lower price.

  Like Mercator, Ortelius began strictly as an engraver, but cartography appealed to him as well. He traveled widely—to Italy, to Frankfurt, to Paris, to England—sometimes with Mercator. He drew on this firsthand knowledge of the world when he moved from engraving others’ work to making his own around 1564, when his first map—Typus orbis terrarum, a world map—appeared. He followed it up a year later with a map of Egypt and went on to produce important maps of Asia and Spain.

  Ortelius was more than a craftsman: he was a serious thinker about geography and cartography. Christophe Plantijn published his Synonymia geographica in 1578, a sophisticated theoretical consideration of the value of ancient sources of geographical information. Ortelius would revise the Synonymia several times, using the title Thesaurus geographicus for the later editions. The final edition, published in 1596, seems to have been the first work to propose a theory that would be demonstrated by science only in the twentieth century. Ortelius noticed that the contours of continents thousands of miles apart are curiously complementary, as if they had once been joined: the eastern coast of South America, for instance, seems as if it was meant to interlock with the western coast of Africa. Ortelius imagined that catastrophic forces—earthquakes, floods—might have somehow torn the continents apart. No one took this eccentric thought seriously for centuries, but the idea was revived in the early twentieth century, and in 1926 someone coined the term continental drift. The phenomenon was finally demonstrated convincingly in the 1960s—a third of a millennium after Ortelius had the initial brainstorm.

  TITLE: Theatrum orbis terrarum

  COMPILER: Abraham Ortelius (1527–98)

  ORGANIZATION: Geographical

  PUBLISHED: Antwerp: Gilles Coppens de Dienst, May 20, 1570

  PAGES: 38 leaves, 53 double-columned maps

  SIZE: 16″ × 10½″ (40 × 26.5 cm)

  AREA: 147 ft2 (13.6 m2)

  PRICE: 5 florins 10 stuivers for a small-paper copy, 7 florins 10 stuivers for a large-paper copy, and 16 florins for a hand-colored large-paper copy

  Ortelius the cartographer did not go it alone. He benefited from Mercator’s friendship, and he made good use of all the best cartographers in Europe. Ortelius’s achievement was not producing original maps, but collecting the best and most up-to-date maps in one place and in one uniform edition. There had been world maps before, and of course there were countless maps of specific regions. No one, though, had ever prepared a single printed source that collected maps, all in the same format, that covered the entire globe. Ortelius’s suite of fifty-three maps and accompanying explanatory text was published in Antwerp in May 1570, bearing the title Theatrum orbis terrarum (Theater of the Globe of the World).

  The Theatrum offered what is now standard in every atlas but was then a novel way of organizing a collection of maps. It opened with a world map, then moves on to more detailed maps of the continents. Ortelius covered the old world of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and even included the latest information from the new world of North and South America, but he missed two entire continents—Australia and Antarctica would not be known to Europeans for generations. He also inexplicably threw in an extra one, occupying nearly the whole of the South Pacific, perhaps influenced by legends of the Incans. And his western coast of South America looks nothing like the real world. To his credit, though, Europeans had encountered North America just a few decades earlier, but Ortelius captured it, labeling it AMERICA SIVE INDIA NOVA, with California depicted accurately as a peninsula.5 Vast stretches of Africa and the Americas were blank, awaiting word from explorers, but the bigger story is how much Ortelius knew at that early period.

  The reaction to the Theatrum was fast and overwhelmingly positive. As Mercator wrote to Ortelius on November 22, 1570:

  I have examined your Theatrum and compliment you on the care and elegance with which you have embellished the labours of the authors, and the faithfulness with which you have preserved the production of each individual, which is essential in order to bring out the geographical truth, which is so corrupted by mapmakers… . You deserve great praise for having selected the best descriptions of each region and collected them into one manual, which can be bought at small cost, kept in a small space and even carried about wherever we please.6

  Mercator was not quite right about the “small cost.” The Theatrum was not cheap when it first came out, and subsequent editions—especially when they were hand-colored—became even more expensive. One source even calls the hand-colored large-paper edition “the most expensive book of its time.”7 Despite the expense, though, it was a hit, and both the success and the expense of the Theatrum led to imitators, such as Gerard de Jode’s Hemispherium ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulum poli arctici (1578). But Ortelius was shrewd, keeping for himself the legal rights to the text, the images, and even the channels of distribution.8 He issued revised versions of the Theatrum, dozens of editions that grew larger over time. The edition of 1612 had grown to 167 maps, with information from nearly two hundred documented sources and always the most au courant knowledge about the world. Translations of the text from the original Latin into Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and English followed quickly. Only in 1624 was the Theatrum overtaken by a more thorough and accurate atlas.

  Ortelius produced what most scholars consider the first atlas, but the term was not his. Mercator first used the name of the ancient Greek Titan for his own book, based largely on Ortelius’s Theatrum: he called it Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi (Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Structure of the World, 1578). As Mercator put it, this collection of fifty-one maps was published “to honor the Titan King Atlas, King of Mauritania, a learned philosopher, mathematician and astronomer.”9

  Ortelius and Mercator were looking around, but some cartographers were busy looking up. “Space,” says that ever-reliable reference work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”10

  Astronomers are charged with dealing with that mind-boggling bigness. There had been many ancient efforts to map the heavens. Some interpreters vie
w the dots on the cave walls at Lascaux from 16,500 B.C.E. as a very early star chart. The Farnese Atlas, which may date from as early as the first century B.C.E., is a sculpted white marble depiction of Atlas supporting the celestial sphere on his shoulder. It shows the constellations, though not the stars that make them up. A Roman manuscript from the second century C.E., the Planisphere of Geruvigus, maps the stars from an earthly point of view. Around the same time Claudius Ptolemy borrowed a star catalog from Hipparchus and depicted 1,022 stars gathered into forty-eight constellations. Ptolemy’s list became the canonical list for a millennium and a half. As late as 1536, a star chart by Peter Bienewitz—also known by the Latin form of his name, Petrus Apianus—showed Ptolemy’s forty-eight constellations and the stars that make them up.

  “No greater problem is presented to the human mind,” said the pathbreaking Harvard astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, than classifying the stars.11 To Johann Bayer, that problem was merely an encouragement. The German lawyer and astronomer is best known for Uranometria, which reduced the colossal amount of new information flooding in from observational astronomers to some systematic order. Bayer’s great atlas of the heavens was the first to try to catalog every star in the universe. It could not have come close to its stated goal, but it did make the work of subsequent astronomers like Galileo and Isaac Newton possible.

  Little is known of Bayer’s life. He was born in Bavaria in 1572, and around the age of twenty he began his studies at the University of Ingolstadt, founded a century before and to this day one of the most prestigious universities in Europe. After Ingolstadt he moved to Augsburg, about eighty miles from his hometown, where he worked as a lawyer; there he developed an interest in astronomy, and particularly in uranography, the mapping of the stars and noting their relative magnitude (brightness).

  When Bayer began his work, Ptolemy was still the unquestioned master, but new astronomical discoveries were forcing people to rethink conventional wisdom. Bayer did not need to start from scratch; he made use of Tycho Brahe’s catalog of just over a thousand stars. But he revised Tycho’s work, adjusting the magnitudes where Tycho got them wrong, and roughly doubling the length of the catalog. Bayer settled on the title Uranometria: Omnium asterismorum continens schemata, nova methodo delineata, æreis laminis expressa. The first word, Uranometria, was a neologism: it means “the measure of Uranus,” the father of Kronos and the grandfather of Zeus; this made him the Greek god of the heavens. The subtitle explained what purchasers would find in the volume: “containing plans of all the stars, displayed in a new method, and engraved on copper.”

  TITLE: Ioannis Bayeri Rhainani I.C. Vranometria: Omnium asterismorum continens schemata, nova methodo delineata, aereis laminis expressa

  COMPILER: Johann Bayer (1572–1625)

  ORGANIZATION: By constellation

  PUBLISHED: Augsburg, Germany: Christophorus Magnus, 1603

  PAGES: 59

  ENTRIES: 1,564 stars in 51 maps

  SIZE: 13¾″ × 9½″ (35 × 24 cm)

  AREA: 53 ft2 (5 m2)

  The fifty-one maps in Uranometria were designed by Bayer, based largely on the work of an earlier mapper of the stars, and engraved on copperplate by Alexander Mair.12 Each of Ptolemy’s forty-eight constellations got its own map. Bayer took the classical constellations seriously, and he included beautiful illustrations of mythological figures supposedly represented in the stars, not mere stick figures. But while the maps were things of beauty, they were also prepared with great scientific care. Bayer superimposed his maps over a grid in what cartographers call trapezoidal projection and geocentric orientation, with the margins calibrated for each degree.13 He was also the first European astronomer to offer a systematic account of the southern sky, and he added twelve constellations—Apis, Avis Indica, Chameleon, Dorado, Grus, Hydrus, Indus, Pavo, Phoenix, Piscis Volans, Toucan, and Triangulum Australe—to the ancient Ptolemaic list. The observations constitute a significant achievement, considering that Bayer was working in the age before telescopes were used in astronomy.

  Bayer’s most lasting contribution, though, and one that outlasted his charts, was the system he worked out in Uranometria for naming stars—the first Western attempt to do so on a scientific basis. People had been assigning names to stars since the earliest days of astronomy, but there was no rhyme or reason to the naming: the brightest star in the night sky was called Sopdet (“the sharp one”) by the ancient Egyptians and Sirius (“glowing”) by the Greeks; the sixth-brightest star, at the left foot of the constellation of Orion, was named Seba-en-Sah (“toe star”) by the Egyptians and Rigl Gawza al-Ysra (“left foot of the central one”) by the Arabians, a name picked up by the Romans as Rigel. The names were colorful but unsystematic, and as the list grew, the traditional names came to seem increasingly inadequate for serious astronomical work.

  Bayer, though, gave each star a name that provided useful scientific information: a star’s name indicated the constellation in which it appeared and its relative brightness among all the stars in that constellation. He began each star’s name with a Greek letter, usually putting the brightest stars in each constellation near the beginning of the alphabet, and then specified the constellation (using the genitive case of the Latin name). What had long been known as Sirius, for instance, became, in Bayer’s system, α Canis Majoris, the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog. Rigel, one of the brighter stars in the constellation of Orion, became β Orionis (or β Ori for short). By the same logic, α Centauri, the star closest to our own sun, was the brightest in the constellation named for the Centaur.14 (When the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet ran out in any given constellation, Bayer turned to the Latin alphabet, giving us star names like d Centauri and G Scorpii.)

  Bayer’s Uranometria caught on, and it “set the standard for future celestial atlases due to its beauty and accuracy.”15 After the first edition of 1603, later printings—with the charts, the accompanying text, or both—appeared in 1624 (twice), 1639, 1640, 1641, 1648, 1654, 1655, 1661, 1666, 1689, 1697, and 1723. Just as important, most of the new star catalogs of the early seventeenth century followed Bayer closely, spreading his work long beyond the era in which his own book was in print. Bayer’s work would not be superseded for more than a century: while the posthumous publication of John Flamsteed’s star atlas in 1729, Atlas coelestis, offered a more thorough catalog of the stars, even that is deeply indebted to Bayer’s Uranometria.

  The Renaissance marked an epoch for mapmaking, and Ortelius was one of the most important figures. In the words of one historian, “The period of cartographic incunabula, characterized by a slavish following of old doctrines and strongly influenced by Ptolemy, was closed. The new period trusted the knowledge of the earth to first hand exploration and scientific investigation rather than to ancient classics.”16 Historians of cartography sometimes refer to this period as the Dutch era, because maps from the Netherlands dominated the world trade in maps—but soon the maps would dominate the world. Kings and princes went on to use cartography to create a consciousness of the nation-state as a coherent entity, one that could be made visible on a wall.17

  Bayer’s work, meanwhile, has been continued by countless astronomers since, and today’s biggest astronomical catalog, USNO-B1.0, contains just over a billion items. This is around 640,000 times as many as the 1,564 in Uranometria, and the catalog itself is about twice the size of the whole of the English Wikipedia. Even this, though, represents a tiny fraction of the stars that exist in the universe. No one knows an exact number, and astronomers argue about even the order of magnitude. One plausible guess of the number of stars, though, puts the figure at seventy sextillion—70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 × 1022. To put this in context, there are roughly a thousand stars in the sky for every grain of sand on the earth. Even the Brobdingnagian USNO-B1.0 has covered only around 0.0000000000015 percent of the estimated total. Astronomers therefore have a lot more work ahead of them. Even if all seven billion people on the plan
et were put to work around the clock, held to an assembly-line pace of cataloging one star per minute, it would take them about 19 million years to get through them all. What’s more, a recent discovery suggests we might have to triple our best guess about the number of stars in the universe.18 If that turns out to be true, the seven billion of us working on the problem will not get a breather for 38 million years more.

  CHAPTER 7 ½

  TELL ME HOW YOU ORGANIZE YOUR BOOKS

  I’ve defined reference books in terms of how individual readers use them, but there’s also an institutional definition: reference books are the ones that never leave the library.1 That’s good news for those inside the library, but it can be disconcerting to those outside. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and all sorts of guides have their passionate devotees—Sean Pidgeon, a novelist and reference publisher, confesses, “I am addicted to looking things up”2—and for junkies like him, waiting until the next library trip to look up a pressing item is simply unthinkable. Reference addicts keep the books they need close at hand. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and David Foster Wallace have spent their lives inside encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances, and atlases. “I’m told that when Auden died,” biographer Francis Steegmuller wrote in 1980, “they found his OED all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should go out.” Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, had little interest in the OED; he was a partisan of Webster’s Second New International Dictionary (1934). After growing weary of using it only in the library, he bought a copy of the bulky volume and took it with him even when he traveled.3