The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library
Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future. This book tells for the first time in English the story of the first great universal library in the age of printing – and of the son of Christopher Columbus who created it.This is the scarcely believable – and wholly true – story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain and himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world’s knowledge in one place, his library in Seville.Hernando was one of the first and greatest visionaries of the print age, someone who saw how the scale of available information would entirely change the landscape of thought and society.His was an immensely eventual life. As a youth, he spent years travelling in the New World, and spent one living with his father in a shipwreck off Jamaica. He created a dictionary and a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain, helped to create the first modern maps of the world, spent time in almost every major European capital, and associated with many of the great people of his day, from Ferdinand and Isabel to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Dürer. He wrote the first biography of his father, almost single-handedly creating the legend of Columbus that held sway for many hundreds of years, and was highly influential in crafting how Europe saw the world his father reached in 1492. He also amassed the largest collection of printed images and of printed music of the age, started what was perhaps Europe's first botanical garden, and created by far the greatest private library Europe had ever seen, dwarfing with its 15,000 books every other library of the day.Edward Wilson-Lee has written the first major modern biography of Hernando – and the first of any kind available in English. In a work of dazzling scholarship, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells an enthralling tale of the age of print and exploration, a story with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution and Globalisation.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Edward Wilson-Lee 2018
Cover illustration by Joe McLaren
Edward Wilson-Lee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008146221
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008146238
Version: 2018-05-04
for Kelcey
Contents
Prologue: Seville, 12 July 1539
PART I: THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
II. In the Chamber of Clean Blood
PART II: A LANGUAGE OF PICTURES
VI. Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax
VIII. The Architecture of Order
PART III: AN ATLAS OF THE WORLD
XIII. The Library Without Walls
PART IV: SETTING THINGS IN ORDER
XIV. Another Europe and the Same
XVII. Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf
Detail of Hernando and Columbus’ route around the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–4.
The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1520–2; the dashed portions are conjectured.
The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1529–31; the dashed portions are conjectured.
Achilles’ shield is therefore the epiphany of Form, of the way in which art manages to construct harmonious representations that establish an order, a hierarchy … Homer was able to construct (imagine) a closed form because he … knew the world he talked about, he knew its laws, causes and effects, and this is why he was able to give it a form. There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large … The infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire, while the other form of representation we are talking about suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the list, or catalogue.
UMBERTO ECO, The Infinity of Lists
Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo, me preparo a morir a unas pocas leguas del hexágono en que nací.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, ‘El Biblioteca de Babel’
The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.
ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, Etymologies I.iii
So if the invention of the Shippe was thought so noble, which carryeth riches, and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits: how much more are letters to be magnified, which as Shippes, passe through the vast Seas of time, and make ages so distant, to participate of the wisdome, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?
FRANCIS BACON, Advancement of Learning
PROLOGUE:
On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed. He told his servants that he was too weak to raise his arms and instructed them to rub the soil on his face. While many of them had been with him for a decade or more and were intensely loyal, they refused on this occasion to obey his orders, thinking he must finally have taken leave of his senses. Hernando mustered the strength he needed and reached into the bowl by himself, smearing his face with the silt of the Guadalquivir, the river that meandered through Seville and held his house in the crook of its arm. As he painted himself with mud, Hernando spoke some words in Latin that began to make sense of this performance for those who had gathered at his side: remember that you are dust
