The director of Spain’s national library was summoned to the ministry of culture to explain why the library took four years to report the theft of a book by the 17th-century Italian astronomer, Galileo Galilei.
According to an investigation by El País, a restoration team discovered in 2014 that the edition of the library of Sidereus Nuncius, published in Venice in 1610, was stolen and replaced with a copy.
“The copy seemed too new to be from 1610,” he told Fuensanta Salvador, one of the restorers who was part of the program. “The printing and embossing process left a mark and had none, it was very clean. We thought it was weird. “
However, Ana Santos, the library’s director, did not report the theft to the police until 2018, and in the years that followed, the counterfeit copy continued to appear in the library’s catalog as the original.
The disappearance was only disclosed after Nick Wilding, a British researcher at the University of Georgia, realized that a copy was on display at the library’s 2018 Cosmos exhibition and asked about the original’s whereabouts.
The book is described as a copy in the exhibition catalog, but Santos said that at the time it did not seem so strange, as he did not know that the library had an original.
Santos, who has been in charge of the library since 2013, told El País that he was only informed of the theft when Wilding contacted her in 2018 and that the first thing he wanted to know was “why was I not informed? ”.
“I can’t be held responsible for something I don’t know,” she said. “It is terrible that the technical team did not tell me about it in 2014.”
His account was contested by Mar Hernández, who was responsible for restoring the library at the time, but has since retired. Hernández insists that the matter was discussed with Santos at a meeting and produced emails from 2014 and 2016 in which he asks the director to be informed of the situation.
Santos said he never received the complaint and also that, after involving the police in 2018, he sent an email to the culture ministry informing him of the theft.
José Guirao, the then Minister of Culture, told El País: “As a minister, I was not informed either about the theft or about the investigation”.
An unidentified source at the library told the newspaper that the Galileo theft was “just the tip of the iceberg”. The source said the book may have been replaced as early as 2007, when two 15º– Maps of the century based on the works of the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy were stolen.
César Ovidio Gómez Rivero, a Spanish resident in Argentina, confessed to the thefts of 2007 and was one of the few people who consulted Sidereus nuncius before being taken. The maps were later retrieved in Sydney and New York, but there are still no traces of the missing book Galileo.
After the 2007 robberies, there was widespread anger over the lack of security in the library, and its then leader, Rosa Regàs, was forced to resign. The then Minister of Culture accused Regàs of not telling him about the theft.
Sidereus Nuncius, valued at € 800,000 (£ 685,000), is written in Latin and describes Galileo’s latest discoveries in astronomy. In 1615, he was tried for heresy by the Inquisition and forced to renounce the claim that we live in a heliocentric universe.