The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself was published by Random House in 1983 and became an international bestseller, translated into over twenty languages. Boorstin, then Librarian of Congress, organized the book not chronologically but thematically, in four parts: Time (the invention of calendars, clocks, and the measurement of duration), The Earth and the Seas (navigation, cartography, the great voyages of exploration), Nature (the development of biology, medicine, and physics), and Society (the discovery of the past through history, and of the present through statistics and social science).
Boorstin’s method is biographical: each discovery is told through the story of the individual or individuals who made it. The invention of the mechanical clock is the story of medieval monks who needed to regulate their hours of prayer. The discovery of America is the story of Columbus’s combination of ambition, error, and luck. The discovery of evolution is the story of Darwin’s painstaking accumulation of evidence and his terror of publishing it.
The book’s governing argument is that the chief obstacle to discovery has never been ignorance but the “illusion of knowledge” — the comfortable beliefs that prevent people from seeing what is in front of them. The Ptolemaic system was not stupid; it was a sophisticated, internally consistent model that explained the observed motions of the planets. Its very sophistication made it resistant to correction. Boorstin argues that every major discovery required not just new information but the courage to abandon an existing framework that was working well enough.
Collecting The Discoverers
First edition (Random House, New York, 1983): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30
- Signed: $60–$150