The director of the National Library of Spain has been summoned to the ministry of culture to explain why it took four years to report the theft of a book by 17th-century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.
According to research by El País, a restoration team discovered the 2014 edition of the library A starry messenger, published in Venice in 1610, had been stolen and replaced by a copy.
“The copy seemed too new for us to be from 1610,” Fuensanta Salvador, one of the restorers who was part of the program, told the newspaper. “The printing and embossing process leaves a mark and I didn’t have any, it was very clean. We thought it was weird. ”
However, Ana Santos, director of the library, did not report the theft to the police until 2018 and, in subsequent years, the counterfeit copy continued to appear in the library catalog as the original.
The disappearance was made public only after Nick Wilding, a British researcher at the University of Georgia, realized there was a copy in the library’s 2018 Cosmos exhibition and asked about the original’s whereabouts.
The book is described as a copy of the exhibition catalog, but Santos said at the time this did not seem so strange to him, as he was unaware 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 not m had they reported? ”.
“I can’t take responsibility for something I don’t know anything about,” he said. “It’s terrible that the technical staff didn’t tell me in 2014.”
His story has been contradicted by Mar Hernández, who at the time was responsible for the restoration of the library, but has since retired. Hernández insists the issue was discussed with Santos at a meeting and produced emails from 2014 and 2016 in which he asked the director to be informed of the situation.
Santos said he never received the report and that, after involving police in 2018, he sent an email to the ministry of culture to inform him of the theft.
José Guirao, the then Minister of Culture, told El País: “As a minister, I was not told about the theft or the investigation.”
An anonymous library source told the newspaper that Galileo’s robbery was “just the tip of the iceberg.” The source stated that the book may have been replaced as early as 2007, when two 15th-Map of the century was stolen based on the works of the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy.
César Ovidio Gómez Rivero, a Spaniard living in Argentina, confessed to the thefts of 2007 and was one of the few people he had consulted. A starry messenger 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 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 Regas of not telling him about the theft.
A starry messenger, valued at 800,000 euros (685,000 pounds), 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 his claim that we live in a heliocentric universe.