Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

About this book

"Created in 1539, the Biblioteca Colombina in Sevilla contains over 3000 books. This is but a fraction of one man's life spent collecting every book on every subject - including antique and modern worlds, science and law, as well as playing cards, pornography, and popular music. Who was Hernando Columbus and how did he achieve this? Set to the backdrop of Christopher Columbus' paradigm-defining explorations of the New World and beyond, and cutting across events of the Renaissance and Reformation, this book follows Hernando Columbus' bibliomania and curation of the first ever library of its kind. As the `natural son' of Christopher, Hernando had a complex relationship to his father and an acute need to validate his position. While originally from Liguria, Italy, it is in Spain that Christopher found travel patronage. The newly united Spain was under the rule of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Due to this special rapport, Hernando spent his formative years as a page boy for Prince Juan, setting himself up as part of the royal inner circle. In his time assisting with the various minute as menial tasks necessary for the care of the Infante, he learned how to devise various organisational systems that would inform his future librarianship. By the time of his death in 1539 Hernando possessed the largest book collection of Europe - yet it was but a fraction of his collection, which he had envisioned as `everything' on every topic. Hernando had built an immortal engine capable of withstanding the return to dust that awaited all humans, creating not only a repository for books but also a proposition for how they would fit together. In this book, Wilson-Lee chronicles his extraordinary journey."--