When Haley Svensrud, Artsci鈥24, became the Bader Digital Humanities Undergraduate Research Assistant in 2022, she had no idea she would soon solve a mystery that would connect Queen鈥檚 to one of the fathers of modern physics.
Ms. Svensrud鈥檚 position was funded by , with encouragement from the late Dr. Isabel Bader, LLD鈥07, who also helped family friend Michael Hatcher donate several of his 16th-century books to Queen鈥檚. While shipping the collection from his Milwaukee home, Mr. Hatcher mentioned that one of the books, a mid-century edition of The Annals of Tacitus, may have once belonged to Sir Isaac Newton.
Mr. Hatcher bought the book at a now-defunct London auction house in the 1960s. Ms. Svensrud contacted the British Library and found a catalogue of the auction. 鈥淲e were able to see the lot number,鈥 she says. 鈥淚t was marked as being in poor condition and it sold for a surprisingly low price.鈥
鈥淚t鈥檚 not what we would call poor condition today,鈥 says Dr. Brendan Edwards, curator of the W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections at Queen鈥檚 Library. 鈥淚t isn鈥檛 in perfect shape, but it鈥檚 also 400-plus years old. The auctioneers didn鈥檛 value it highly, and Mr. Hatcher got lucky. He didn鈥檛 realize what he had until later.鈥
The telltale signs confirming the book鈥檚 provenance include two bookplates inside the cover bearing the names of former owners. 鈥淛ust having one bookplate wouldn鈥檛 necessarily mean it was Newton鈥檚 book,鈥 Ms. Svensrud says, 鈥渂ut having both made it much more likely.鈥
There are other signs, too, including significant dog-earing. 鈥淣ewton was known to dog-ear his books,鈥 says Dr. Edwards, 鈥渁nd not just in the corner. He would often fold to point to a paragraph on the page, so the dog-ears could be large. Our book shows evidence of multiple dog-ears of different sizes.鈥
鈥淎ll these clues are not evident at first glance,鈥 Dr. Edwards adds. 鈥淗aley was able to exercise her historical research skills and, short of Newton having signed his name on it, everything lines up. I鈥檇 say we鈥檙e 99.9 per cent certain that this was his book.鈥
Dr. Edwards has notified the Newton Project, an Oxford-based group dedicated to preserving Newton鈥檚 legacy, of the book鈥檚 existence, and he and Ms. Svensrud expect a lot of scholarly interest in the years to come. In the meantime, it will remain, with the rest of Mr. Hatcher鈥檚 collection, in the vaults.
