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    The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library
    Unavailable
    The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library
    Unavailable
    The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library

    Written by Edward Wilson-Lee

    Narrated by Richard Trinder

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    WINNER OF THE 2019 PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

    The fascinating history of Christopher Columbus’s illegitimate son Hernando, guardian of his father’s flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogue supreme, whose travels took him to the heart of 16th-century Europe’ Honor Clerk, Spectator, Books of the Year

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMay 17, 2018
    ISBN9780008244163
    Unavailable
    The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library
    Author

    Edward Wilson-Lee

    Having grown up in Kenya and Switzerland, with periods living in Mexico, Zimbabwe, and the United States, Edward Wilson-Lee now lives in Cambridge, where he teaches Renaissance literature and is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.

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    Reviews for The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Hernando Colòn was the youngest (and an illegitimate) son of Christopher Columbus. Hernando travelled with his father on his last voyage to the new world in 1502. During the trip, Hernando found he had a joy in making lists and descriptions of things as various as shipboard items and descriptions of lands visited.Returning to Europe, he began to collect art prints. Since his collection contained thousands of them, he began to device ways of classifying them to ensure he would not have duplicates.So when his prime love turned to book collection, he also invented ways to classify them – including books listing volumes, price, etc. But these were not enough and he began devising ways that he could locate volumes that included various subjects, which he called Book of Epitomes – a way to extract the ideas of each volume by summarizing the arguments. This was a forerunner of today’s card catalog and Google searches.This was the time of the High Renaissance in Europe. Printing press were king and the books written by the philosophers and theologians of the day were changing the course of Western History.Hernando threw himself into collecting – not just major works by contemporary authors such as Martin Luther, but also broadsheets and pamphlets which often were thought to have little value. He and his designated lieutenants scoured Europe and beyond for his collection.Even with the loss from a shipwreck of 1637 books, he managed to amass a collection of some twenty thousand books which eventually became the Biblioteca Hernandina in Seville, Spain. Upon his death, the books, prints, broadsides and pamphlets were not valued and most of them were destroyed or decayed. Only a few thousand exist today.This is a fascinating book. There is lots of wonderful history of the Age of Discovery, the High Renaissance, the sack of Rome in 1527 which caused the loss of the Vatican library, and Hernando’s struggle to establish his father as the discoverer of the New World.Recommended to those who are bibliophiles or love libraries, but history lovers will also enjoy this, too. It took me quite a while to read this, but although it was harder for me with my limited knowledge of the European history and politics of the late 1400’s and early 1500’s, I thought it was a fascinating read. It is beautifully illustrated with an amazing number of prints and maps from the time period.
    • 4/5
      As a professional archivist I found this to be a very cool work, considering that Hernando Colon (the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus) seems to be a man after my own heart, with his obsessions regarding books and information and how to organize the positive onslaught of stuff that was already pouring forth from the printing presses of Europe in the early to mid 1500s. Though with a little more luck Colon might have been remembered as the father of library science, his real impact was to create the Christopher Columbus of popular myth; this spinning of the image of the great man being necessary to maintain the Colon family's fortunes as courtiers of the royal House of Spain. While I found this to be a lively story, the reality is that Wilson-Lee assumes that you have some background in the period, and will otherwise, dare I say it, be somewhat left out to sea.
    • 5/5
      Christopher Columbus's son Hernando, while unknown to most of us, was a man ahead of his time. Possessed of an inquiring intellect, he endeavored to accrue what at the time was the largest personal library in Europe, with 15,000 volumes. More importantly, he recognized that this much information would be useless unless the contents could be accessed, so he also developed a variety of indices, including a forerunner of the card catalog. His vision was nothing less than "an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web."His intent was not simply to amass a dusty collection of materials (he focused primarily on the printed book, but also favored what librarians call ephermera--pamphlets, posters, etc., as well as sheet music, all materials ignored by libraries of his day), but to make it a working library. This effort was primarily in defense of his father's legacy, and much of the book is spent recounting Columbus's legal challenges, which Hernando spent decades in the court of Spain's Charles I working to resolve. That Columbus has the reputation he does today is due largely to the success of those efforts, made possible by the library containing all the works necessary to rebut and correct those seeking to diminish Columbus. I, for one, did not know the fuller details of that history, and found the account a genuine gap-filler. Hernando died fairly young, and despite leaving clear and innovative instructions for the growth of his library, his nephew let it fall to ruin. Only about 4,000 of the volumes are today preserved. I'd be surprised if most readers did not enjoy the story, and find the historical background truly enlightening.
    • 4/5
      Edward Wilson-Lee has written a book that raises some very interesting questions, and is a real attempt to investigate the workings of a mind formed by mostly medieval concepts. It is a biography of Christopher Columbus' illegitimate son, Hernando Colon. i use as Wilson-L:ee does the Spanish form of his name, because it reveals a facet of the mental framework of the man's life. it seems Hernando spent a very great part of his life pursuing the polishing of his father's image, and the financial rewards resulting from the discovery of America. The book also visits the questions dealt with in the creation of one of the great libraries of the sixteenth century, and one of the first general purpose, and mixed media collections in the world. We visit, as well as the Caribbean, the central questions of librarianism....what will one include in one's collections, and how will one order and access the material? The book is well written, with occasional strokes of wit and adequate mapping of a largely peripatetic life, but a life with a purpose that led the man into some rather odd byways. It expands the mind of the reader by raising an image of the real changes between 1500 and now, in the mental life of people in general.
    • 4/5
      As a retired librarian, I really enjoyed this book. Sometimes a bit slow to read, it is both a biography and an introduction to early librarianship. Hernando Colon, illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, went with his father on later voyages to the New World. During his life, he began collecting early printed books and flyers. He began a dictionary, and dealt with early problems of librarianship with large collections of over 10,000 items. Cataloges for library collections had not been invented yet, nor had the erection of upright shelves holding books upright on the shelves. Hernando did it first, and some of his efforts were good, and others were blind alleys. One item he worked with was a system to annotate the printed works. In addition to the titles and authors in the catalogue, the annotations included basic points and subjects of the work, which were often not indicated in the titles. An interesting book on the early days of exploration and printing, showing how libraries began to form and to become useful repositories of learning. The final interesting point is the this collection, of possibly 20,000 books, still exists, although only about 4,000 of the early works remain today. They are victims of times, insects, the Inquisition and looting. A good book for librarians, book collectors and bibliophiles. And for the history of the Columbus family.
    • 4/5
      I was intrigued--Columbus had a son who created the world's greatest library? Why hadn't we heard about him? What happened to all the books? How did he even embark on such a quest? I had to read this book.Hernando may have been an illegitimate son but in 1502 his father Christopher Columbus took the thirteen-year-old along on his fourth voyage to the New World. Hernando started his life familiar with lands and cultures that most of the world didn't even know existed.The book recounts Columbus's discoveries and his struggle to maintain his status and share of New World wealth for his heirs. The Admiral of the Ocean reigned as the greatest explorer for only a short time before he was dethroned. He became old news as successive explorers stole attention and acclaim. Spain sought to discredit Columbus as the first to discover the New World, desirous of keeping all the New World wealth. Hernando determined to return and solidify his father's status by writing a book about his father's life--essentially the first biography.The other part of the book is Hernando's thirst for knowledge, his obsession with collecting books of every kind, in every language--even if he couldn't read them. He collected prints and maps and art and ephemera gleaned from small booksellers.He kept lists of his books and when he lost over a thousand books in a shipwreck he knew which ones he needed to replace. He developed methods to catalog and organize the books and to retrieve the information in the books.Hernando was called upon to create a definitive map of the New World so that Spain and Portugal could finalize their territorial rights. He began an exhaustive dictionary but abandoned it knowing he could never finish it.As he traveled across Europe, Hernando came into contact with all the great thinkers whose ideas were rocking the world: Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, Thomas More. During Hernando's lifetime, Henry was looking to divorce Catherine, Suleiman was conquering the Eastern reaches of Europe, and the Holy Roman Emperor was crowned as the head of church and state. Luther's teaching had fueled the Peasant's Revolt and the anti-authoritarian Anabaptist movement arose.In his later life, Hernando settled down and built his house and perfected his library. His garden was an arboretum containing plants and trees from across the world.Hernando's achievement was remarkable. His goal to order all human knowledge for accessible retrieval was monumental. But after his death, most of his work and library were lost to neglect and time.Through the life of one man, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books gave me a panoramic view of the 16th c., an overview of the life and achievements of Christopher Columbus, and a biography of his son Hernando.I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.