The director of the Spanish National Library has been summoned to the Ministry of Culture to explain why it took the library four years to report the theft of a book by 17th-century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.
According to an investigation by El País, a restoration team discovered in 2014 that the library’s edition of Sidereus Nuncius, published in Venice in 1610, was stolen and replaced with a copy.
“The copy was too new for us to be from 1610,” Fuensanta Salvador, one of the restaurateurs who were part of the program, told the newspaper. ‘The printing and embossing process left a mark, and it had nothing, it was very clean. We thought it was weird. ”
However, Ana Santos, the director of the library, only reported the theft to the police in 2018 and in the intervening years, the forged copy still appeared in the library’s catalog as the original.
The disappearance was only announced after Nick Wilding, a British researcher at the University of Georgia, noticed that a copy was being exhibited in the library’s Cosmos exhibition in 2018, and asked where the original origin was.
The book is described as a copy in the exhibition catalog, but Santos said it did not strike her as strange at the time, as she was not aware that the library owned an original book.
Santos, who has been in charge of the library since 2013, told El País that she was only made aware of the theft when Wilding contacted her in 2018 and that the first thing she wanted to know was “why am I not informed? ”.
“I can not be held responsible for something I know nothing about,” she said. “It’s awful that technical staff did not tell me about this in 2014.”
Her report was contradicted by Mar Hernández, who at the time was responsible for restoration in the library, but has since retired. Hernández insists that the issue was discussed during a meeting with Santos and provided emails from 2014 and 2016 in which she asked the director to be informed of the situation.
Santos said she never received the report, and also that, after involving the police in 2018, she sent an email to the Ministry of Culture to report the theft.
José Guirao, the then Minister of Culture, told El País: “As theft or investigation, I did not say.”
An unnamed source in the library told the newspaper that the Galileo theft ‘was only the tip of the iceberg’. The source claims that the book may have been replaced as early as 2007, when two 15decentury maps based on the works of the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy were stolen.
César Ovidio Gómez Rivero, a Spaniard living in Argentina, admitted 2007 theft and was one of the few people consulted Sidereus nuncius before it was taken. The maps were later recovered in Sydney and New York, but there is still no trace of the missing Galileo book.
After the thefts in 2007, there was great anger over the lack of security at the library, and the then leader, Rosa Regàs, was forced to resign. The then Minister of Culture accused Regàs of not telling him about the theft.
Sidereus Nuncius, worth € 800,000 (£ 685,000), is written in Latin and describes Galileo’s latest discoveries in astronomy. In 1615 he was tried by the Inquisition for heresy and forced to renounce his claim that we live in a heliocentric universe.