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

- Blurb -

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 Colombus who created it. 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 (conceived out of wedlock), Hernando had a complex relationship to his father and an acute need to validate his position. Hernando was still a young child during the exploration of 1492 - Christopher's many travels kept them apart for months at a time. 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.Christopher carried on with his mission to expand Christianity in the West and elsewhere - not least Jerusalem, which he deemed the rightful property of Spain after his discovery of the New World. Christopher and Hernando eventually grew closer during an exploration that led them to spend a year shipwrecked by St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica and leading to a close rapport where Hernando recorded his father's life.Shaped by those experiences, 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.