In Physics 1a, the professor, Dr. David Goodstein, brought out a first edition copy of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, the book in which he first suggested that the explanation of celestrial bodies would be a lot easier is they revolved around the Sun instead of the Earth. This other page gives more information about the book including the publication date of 1543 (first edition) and a clearer title page image:
I tried to take a picture of the book (it’s flipped to the title page), but people were mobbing the front, and this was the best shot I could manage:
It’s not all that exciting, but it’s still cool to be able to see such an old book that was hand bound and manually typeset. I would estimate that it had about 250 pages which definitely took a lot of work. I think the idea of publishing books so long ago without today’s technology is quite a feat.