The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee

Apr 04, 2019 Elizabeth A.G. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Meticulously researched book about Columbus's voyages and focusing on his illegitimate son, Hernando (Fernando) Colon, whose idea about creating, organizing and categorizing a "universal" library of the world's published items including books, pamphlets, maps, news articles, music, ballads, etc. was a voyage unto its own. Wilson-Lee provides us with the historical background of Hernando Colon's almost maniacal obsession to create his library and to restore the reputation of Columbus's legacy whi ...more

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Feb 11, 2019 Nancy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

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 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. ...more

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Apr 26, 2019 Lissa Notreallywolf rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-history, medical-history, history-of-science, bibliophile-books

At about page fifty I found myself asking whether this book was fact or fiction because it was so fabulous in the telling. It is described of as a biography of Christopher Columbus's son Hernando Colon, but fails in the usual sense of a biography because it is really the story of a library Colon collected, and his struggle to grasp the new horizons of information. Now that may sound dull, but I had no concept that Columbus made multiple voyages to the New World accompanied by his bastard son. Pe ...more

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Apr 17, 2019 Matt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: other-history, philosophy, nautical-history, biography

This is a book that will ruin at least the next 3 books I read... it's so good that nothing else will hold up by comparison! It combines exploration, European Renaissance history, and philosophy of information in one endlessly fascinating package. I never knew about Hernando Colon, Christopher Columbus' impressive son. He saw so much of history... going on his father's 4th journey to the "New" World, traveling all around Europe, meeting with the Pope, working for the Holy Roman Emperor, sailing ...more

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Aug 08, 2019 Ms.pegasus rated it liked it

Shelves: memoir-biography, nonfiction, history

A historian, no matter how meticulous, connects with a general audience only when he feels the confidence to invest something of himself. It's a confidence based on erudition, not, as in the case of pareidolia, of temperament or impulse. Although he is referring to his subject Hernando Colón (favorite son of Christopher Columbus), Wilson-Lee seems to also be voicing his own struggles in writing this book when he says: “How does one make a life out of words and paper? Capturing the essence of ano ...more

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Apr 01, 2019 Paul Pessolano rated it really liked it

“The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library” by Edward Wilson-Lee, published by Scribner.

Category – History Publication Date – March 12, 2019.

It is very difficult to assign a rating to this book because it is not intended for the casual reader. The book has been written by a scholar for scholars, or for those who have an overwhelming desire to learn more about Christopher Columbus and his son. It would score probably a 4 ...more

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Mar 11, 2019 Nostalgia Reader marked it as dnf · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook-netgalley, on-the-blog

DNF at 43%.

I just about got a headache from how tedious these chapters were to read so far, and seeing as I have lots more interesting and fun books lined up at the moment, this is going to have to be a DNF.

It felt like a haphazard attempt at very specific history of Renaissance sciences and culture through the life of Hernando. I was hoping for an actual biography of Hernando, focusing heavily on his book and image collecting, with the inevitable brief forays into the culture and ways of the ti ...more

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Oct 01, 2019 Jerrie (redwritinghood) rated it liked it · review of another edition

I’m finding this one a little difficult to review. The audiobook narration was often dry, but I also think I was expecting something more about the book collection than was here. That being said, this was a good overview of Columbus’ voyages and his son Hernando Colon’s attempts to preserve his father’s memory and create an organized book collection. There are many other issues explored, though, that took the focus away from the book collection. For example, much was written about Colon’s attemp ...more

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Sep 04, 2019 Kathy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This really is amazing in its depth, breadth with its detailed results of dedicated research as well as the enlightenment it brings to a poorly educated soul (moi!). Yes, I have read some accounts of controversy over Columbus but they were more like newspaper articles here and there.
The author Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature, thus the perfect candidate to study, gather material and expound clearly ...more

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May 18, 2019 Nina rated it really liked it

"Even fifty thousand books without order is not a library, any more than a crowd of thirty thousand undisciplined men is an army." Christopher Columbus's son Hernando, besides being a bibliophile of the highest order, was also something of a genius. Hernando's obsession coincided with the vast increase in books following the spread of the printing press. The sheer volume surpassed any librarian's ability to remember where a particular tome was located (and you had to be aware of what book you we ...more

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Aug 14, 2020 Alex Sarll added it · review of another edition

My last unread library book, and one which talks about one of the first libraries we'd recognise, an early adopter of such now-universal conventions as shelving the books by theme and author, of having them spine outwards. Granted, not all of Hernando Columbus' ideas were such winners; OK, none of us are really allowed into libraries anymore, but back in those glorious days when we were, at least we only had to worry about the doorways beeping at us on the way out if something hadn't been issued My last unread library book, and one which talks about one of the first libraries we'd recognise, an early adopter of such now-universal conventions as shelving the books by theme and author, of having them spine outwards. Granted, not all of Hernando Columbus' ideas were such winners; OK, none of us are really allowed into libraries anymore, but back in those glorious days when we were, at least we only had to worry about the doorways beeping at us on the way out if something hadn't been issued properly, whereas in Hernando's ambitious plan, the stock would be protected by the readers only being able to access the shelves through small gaps in a cage, a process I picture as being a bit like handling nuclear fuel rods crossed with feeding time at the zoo. Very 2020, come to think of it. But other bits – he was one of the first to consider pamphlets and other non-respectable writings worthy of inclusion! A concept which some institutions still struggled with well into the late 20th century, if not to this day (mentioning no names, Cambridge University Library). Such an immense thing of which to know the originator, even if it was a broken lineage from then to now.

If you're wondering about the surname – yes, Hernando was the bastard and biographer of Christopher, though as Wilson-Lee points out, that name was by no means universal. Indeed, that he was also known as Colon was one of the many things he took as being providential about himself, it meaning 'member', as in, of the Church he planned to spread. It also shares a root with 'colony' and, of course, can be taken to indicate something full of shit. Seriously, I didn't know much about the guy beyond the date, the names of the ships, and the ultimate outcome, but it's noticeable that it's not just from a modern perspective that he comes across as a problem. Even other people merrily engaged on the colonial project mostly couldn't stand the guy, and no wonder – he was quite spectacularly full of himself, as witness the Book of Prophecies he compiled - drawing on everything from the obvious-ish (Isaiah as translated into Latin by St Jerome) to the less so (Seneca's Medea) to demonstrate that the world was about to be united in accordance with the divine scheme, and that he was the only person who could do it. The evidence suggests that Hernando, despite only being 12 at the time, leant his dad a hand with this project, and this theme recurs; Christopher as the madcap doer, Hernando as the organiser trailing in his wake. The worst of it being, Christopher was the sort of narcissistic loon who pulls it off just often enough to keep getting away with it. Seriously, he dominates about the first third of this, and even beyond wider debates about his role in history (which do crop up here, but maybe not as much as they would had it been written a year or two later), just considered as an individual, he's absolutely infuriating.

So he steals the limelight for about the first third of the book, and continues to cast a shadow over the rest, which while a shame, is probably unavoidable. Not least because Wilson-Lee is writing a biography of Hernando, whom he claims, albeit with caveats, as the first modern biographer, based on his deeply partial life of his father. And then uses this to interrogate his own project, as a biographer of a biographer: "biography is a literary ruse, a sleight of hand that uses the personal story to say something about the world beyond that person, to arrange (in a sense) the world around them". You can't put everything in a biography, after all, can you, or it's just an unmanageable mess. Though it wouldn't be a surprise to find Hernando attempting biography in that vein, because his projects did tend towards a compendious gigantism which Wilson-Lee calls Herculean, but might be better considered Borgesian or Sisyphean. His survey of Spain, for instance, an early attempt at maps which corresponded to the literal facts on the ground, and an accompanying guidebook, but which then suffered mission creep until a team of subordinates – with redundancy to cross-check and weed out slackers – were supposed to record everything memorable about a place. Which, even now that data storage is considerably smaller and cheaper than it was in the days of folios, is still a project that at some stage tips over from very useful into practically useless. And back then...well.

The library, though, the library is what we're here for, or what I am. And it really does seem to have been a forerunner of the information ages to follow, in its innovations and also in its discontents. Hernando hit not only on the shelving system we still know, but on something like a no-longer-quite-modern card catalogue. Yes, he lived in an age of projects for categorising and organising all information, but where most of those systems now read nearly as comically as Borges' pastiche of them (animals belonging to the emperor; animals that have just broken the vase; animals drawn with a fine camel-hair brush), Hernando's does sound more like the godfather of the Dewey Decimal et al. Where problems persisted, they're often ones we still face; not long before I started reading this, I had a conversation about how one stores and categorises downloaded meme images for quick retrieval, which was not far at all from Hernando's struggles to index his collection of prints. Past a certain amount of information, all systems falter, and while Wilson-Lee goes very slightly too trendy vicar in calling Hernando's project a search engine, it's closer to the mark than it has any right to be. His idea of compiling epitomes and distributing the catalogues, even while holding on to his enormous collection of original volumes, is recognisably similar to Google News et al; equally, the issue of junk data hasn't changed that much since you had worthless volumes relying on a title page and a lack of reviews to earn a few dirty sales – pretty much printed clickbait. You can have a 'dead' library now more easily than ever, one in which much is stored but nothing can be located – and yet whatever system you use to order it, you impose preconceptions, favour some associations over others. Hell, I know that even when I'm writing one of these lengthier reviews, struggling to choose which bead to string next to which other bead to make a comprehensible pattern.

Even if you're not that into the whole library organisation conundrum bit, though, there's a lot of other stuff here. For instance: hopefully we all know by now that a belief in a flat Earth was not mainstream circa 1500, nor any obstacle to Columbus' voyages. What I didn't know, though, was that some thought one direction of the Atlantic crossing might be trickier than the other, because you were going uphill. Columbus himself had the dimensions of the globe way out, but his main mistake seems to have been thinking that the Earth was shaped much like a boob, with the Earthly Paradise as the nipple. Which, ridiculous as it sounds, was one way of accounting for certain inconsistencies in compass readings; Hernando was perhaps the first instead to hit on the correct interpretation, namely that magnetic north and true north aren't identical. The privations of the voyage, which I've no doubt many would now consider richly deserved, are impressive – but at the same time, Wilson-Lee contextualises it as not that drastically different from the travails of journeys within Europe, where a bridal party of 25-30,000 headed from Spain to Flanders and back could lose somewhere between a half and a third to the winter (which also really puts into perspective both the scale and the risk of even the most lavish pre-Event modern stag dos). There's the intriguing detail, completely new to me, that Henry VII was very nearly the backer and beneficiary of Columbus' expedition – being narrowly beaten to it in an incident which Columbus, like all great bullshitters also a true believer, put down to providence. But how different might things have been? His son might have had more leverage with the Pope, for one thing, if we'd even got to that point. Would South America now speak English too?

As was, of course, we ended up with what could be considered peak colonialism, the era of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which not only brazenly ignored the various heathens somehow under the impression that they owned the rest of the world, but also excluded most of Europe, insisting that between them, the countries of Iberia owned everything beyond the continent's bounds. The only question being exactly how that demarcation should be interpreted, and Hernando headed the Spanish delegation to a summit on the question – during which one small boy, suggesting that he knew exactly where they could find the line they were having such difficulty locating, perpetrated possibly history's single finest mooning. That aside, though, it's a dismal business, not least for the unlovely spectacle of the way Spain could, in a single year, both finally win its own long anti-colonialist struggle and then instantly become a major colonial power (not to mention the celebratory bout of ethnic cleansing). An example which I think goes a long way to explain my own unease with the idea that structural power imbalances explain whether or not a given behaviour is fully to be condemned - not least because sometimes those structures can be inverted bloody quickly. What's interesting is how much Hernando himself sits at right angles to the colonial project of which he's such an early and significant part – in later life he'd compare English and Venetian ways to what he'd seen in the Caribbean, not vice versa, because that was what he'd seen first. An upbringing which decentred the European perspective even as it exported it! Meanwhile, the continuing and increasingly inexplicable cheerleading of this plaguey rock's global significance is put nicely into perspective here: only after a discussion of the Arabic texts he collected do we get "the fact that Hernando had almost no books in English, despite his visit to London, is likely because few even of the most learned outside the British Isles understood anything of the language". Similarly, it was just as I was cracking up at Venice's outlandishly convoluted system for electing the Doge that my laugh died as I realised we're in no position to mock how anyone else chooses their leaders.

At the end of it all, what are we left with? A figure easier to like than his father, I think any but the most ardent imperialist would say. But one whose great projects mostly came to naught, incomplete and not long outliving him. Something like Alexander weeping that with so many worlds he hadn't even conquered one, but for ideas instead of territory – yet also alloyed with a bathetic dash of Casaubon, or even Simon Quinlank, King Of All Hobbies. Certainly I'm glad to have made his acquaintance. Now what I'd really like to read next is some more about his tutor Peter Martyr, a curious figure in many ways – among other things, he would subsequently become a pioneer in popularising ancient Egypt to modern Europe, and was supposedly the first European to come back from the interior of the Pyramids (reputedly, someone before him had entered, but of course they were never been seen again..). ...more

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Oct 26, 2020 Gordon rated it really liked it

In 1502, a 13-year old Spanish boy sailed off from the port of Cadiz in Spain with his father, the ship's captain, on a voyage of exploration across the Atlantic, to spend the next two years wandering among the islands of the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central and South America. Along the way, they faced hurricanes, a mutiny, near-starvation, a shipwreck that left them stranded in a lonely bay on the coast of Jamaica for 13 months, and the intrigues of the Spanish governor of Hispaniola. In 1502, a 13-year old Spanish boy sailed off from the port of Cadiz in Spain with his father, the ship's captain, on a voyage of exploration across the Atlantic, to spend the next two years wandering among the islands of the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central and South America. Along the way, they faced hurricanes, a mutiny, near-starvation, a shipwreck that left them stranded in a lonely bay on the coast of Jamaica for 13 months, and the intrigues of the Spanish governor of Hispaniola. The father was Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final trip to the new world; the boy was his younger son Hernando Colon.

In one of the more bizarre episodes of the trip, Columbus had sent a handful of his crew on a risky voyage in a barely seaworthy canoe to make their way to Hispaniola in order to obtain rescue for the rest of the marooned crew. The governor of the island sent a rescue ship, which managed to find the survivors, only to inform them that the governor lacked the resources to rescue them -- and then dropped off a barrel of wine and promptly sailed away! Columbus and crew eventually did get rescued a month later, and still later limped their way back to Spain in 1504, two years after their departure. The trip broke Columbus' health, and he died two years later.

Hernando was not the man of action and leader of men that his father was, but he was extraordinary in very different ways. Raised at court along with his older half-brother, he was extremely well educated, had an omnivorously curious mind, and mastered fields as wide-ranging as astronomy, cartography, mathematics, medicine, Latin, Greek, ... and library science. Library science? He was a voracious reader and an even more voracious collector of books, and those books needed to be organized somehow at a time when there was no acceptable method for organizing printed knowledge on this kind of scale.

As a member of the Spanish royal court, Hernando roamed the vast European imperial realms of Spain along with the monarch -- first with Ferdinand and Isabella, and later with their grandson Charles V, whose accession to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire and possession of the enormous holdings of the Hapsburgs in Italy, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands meant that Hernando's travels became ever more wide-ranging. He even took time off to spend some years at the Vatican, to plead a complex legal case of his brother before an ecclesiastical court, while attending university lectures whenever he could from the great scholars of his day. Wherever he went, he sought out intellectuals, artists ... and book-sellers. How he managed to finance his bibliomania is a bit of a mystery, as his income seemed highly dependent on the whims of the monarch, but since he was interested in acquiring little else by way of material possessions, he somehow made it work.

Hernando was fortunate to live in the decades immediately following the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the mid-1400's, which was following by a great outpouring of works previously only available to the fortunate few who could afford the immense expense of acquiring books painfully copied by hand, one at a time. In addition to ancient works, new works also poured from the presses, since this was the height of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. And of course, he had both the means and the opportunity to acquire these newly printed books, travelling as he did to some of the great publishing centers of Europe such as Rome, Venice, Basel, Nuremberg, Strassburg, and so on. Unlike many book collectors, Hernando was not a narrow specialist in his range of his interests -- he wanted to create a universal library, and even included books in non-European languages, notably Arabic, and ephemera such as pamphlets and prints that were scorned by other collectors. Eventually, his book collection in Seville where he finally made his home reached somewhere around 15-20,000 volumes, plus several thousand prints. His collection was the world's largest private library of its day.

In addition to his court duties -- as a geographer, diplomat and courtier -- Hernando was also a writer. Some of his writing projects, such as a geography of Spain and a set of abstracts ("Epitomes") of the books in his collection, had little lasting significance. Some were bizarre, such as the Book of Prophecies, mainly written by his father but with contributions from the teenage Hernando, that sought to find in the Bible passages which foreshadowed Columbus's achievements, and therefore validated them as being divinely ordained. But his most enduring contribution was a biography of his father, which remains the most accurate accurate record of Columbus's life. Since no one had his intimate knowledge of his father, and no one else had access to such a trove of historical documents such as logs and maps relating to his father's explorations, his biography is the definitive source for scholars who followed him in later centuries.

The author of this biography of Hernando Colon, an English historian of medieval and Renaissance literature, seems himself to be as omnivorously curious as his subject. And like his subject, Edward Wilson-Lee is meticulous in drawing on original sources, and is informed by extensive travels to the countries covered by Hernando. He makes much of the contributions that Hernando made to the organizing of knowledge, comparing him to a sort of one-man Google of his day. Unfortunately, the great library amassed by Hernando never truly became the kind of enduring knowledge archive open to the world's scholars that he hoped, because his nephew and heir had little interest in his collection. It eventually passed to a monastery in Seville, and then to the Cathedral of Seville, where what remains of it resides today. There, many of its volumes, especially those by Protestant authors such as Luther, fell victim to book-burning Inquisitors at the time of the Counter-Reformation. In general, the collection was largely neglected for centuries, eventually being further reduced by pilfering and the ravages of time to just a quarter of its original size -- to a still considerable 4000 volumes.

On the whole, Hernando Colon remains a sort of fascinating historical oddity, an intellectual in a time of great cultural and religious turmoil and warfare, who roamed widely, sat at the tables of both the mighty and the learned, and pursued his passionate curiosity wherever he went.

If you enjoy books of the historical buffet variety, you will find A Catalog of Shipwrecked Books a very satisfying read. ...more

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May 02, 2019 Carlos rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars for this book. The parts that dealt with Christopher Columbus and his son were very descriptive and at moments very well researched. The thing that I didn't like was that I felt the author expanded too much in different topics that while helped give historical context to what was being said , it also felt like it was too much and made the reading of the book a little bit morose. This was my first nonfiction book in a while so I might have been a little bit rusty (even though I saw that ...more

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Nov 30, 2018 Jim Razinha rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: review-copies

I received a eGalley of this from the publisher through Edelweiss.

The subtitle order is Columbus, Hernando (his son) and lastly, the library. And what you get is a lot of Columbus, nearly as much Hernando, other contemporary hsitories of the various crowns and explorers, and a fraction by comparison about the library Hernando assembled. In reading this, I kept asking myself how much was speculation and how much had some basis in history. More history than I thought, as the endnotes are detailed I received a eGalley of this from the publisher through Edelweiss.

The subtitle order is Columbus, Hernando (his son) and lastly, the library. And what you get is a lot of Columbus, nearly as much Hernando, other contemporary hsitories of the various crowns and explorers, and a fraction by comparison about the library Hernando assembled. In reading this, I kept asking myself how much was speculation and how much had some basis in history. More history than I thought, as the endnotes are detailed and extensive and provide an excellent collateral backstory to the main narrative. Unfortunately, an electronic interface is clumsy (see note below) and their value is hard won for the poor reader.

While the lives of Columbus and his illegitimate second son are fascinating, I wanted to know more about the library. One get slightly meaty bits and pieces scattered through the story of Hernando's acquisitional pursuits, a short passage of the tragedy that prompted the title (1,637 precious books found and purchased on a quest of the Continent went down with a ship in 1622 that was bringing them to Spain), and at last a detailed description of the makeup and size of what was the largest private library to date in the penultimate chapter and the epilogue.

I knew of Columbus's religious proclivities, but wasn't aware that he wrote something called the Book of Prophesies and my notes at this passage were "This just took a weird turn.":

It is mesmerizing to think that not only were the revelations of The Book of Prophesies being honed even as father and son explored new reaches of the western Atlantic, but, even more astonishingly, that the book's predictions about Tarshish, Ophir, and Kittim and their place in providential history meant they were in effect carrying with them a guidebook to unknown lands. The prophetic manuscript functioned like a map in reverse, providing them with landmarks that needed to be arranged on the landscape they were about to witness.

Apart from weird, that's rather absurd. Columbus wrote the thing! And was astonished by it's predictions? (The three names mentioned are either places or minor biblical characters descended from the Noah guy...apparently not exactly clear.)

Hernando was innovative in cataloguing his huge library, and even tried to address a serious problem of indexing. Wilson-Lee says "Searching an index is all but useless unless you know the term you are looking for, and in the instructions Hernando left for his assistants he directed them to use the most common term for the subject in question, as well as putting it under more than one heading when in doubt." Obvious, but often unstated...all but useless unless you know the term. Yep.

The story drags at points when it waxes academic, but Wilson-Lee does keep the interest up with a lot of information.

A note on the reading: in my PDF copy, the notes were not hyperlinked, which present challenges. The book would be better read as a hard copy, as the text is definitely enhanced by the notes and "flipping" back and forth is burdensome in an ereader.

A note to the editor: a couple of times the phrase "In the event..." leads sentences that don't syntactically jibe. Example, page 83 in my ecopy: "In the event, the new governor, Nicolas de Ovando - [...] - refused to oblige Columbus in any way and was even deaf to his pleas to be let into the harbor to shelter from the vast storm that was collecting over the Caribbean Sea." ...more

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Jul 15, 2019 Carl Waluconis rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

All bibliophiles will love this extraordinary story of Hernando Colon who amassed a collection of over 5,000 books. He traveled through Europe meeting and purchasing. This included meeting authors of the time such as Erasmus and Thomas More. Hernando included buying prints and various illustrations. He included everything that offered new ways of thinking. His path crossed Durer's in his own travels, and Hernando sought out those prints. There were other collections at the time, but Hernando was All bibliophiles will love this extraordinary story of Hernando Colon who amassed a collection of over 5,000 books. He traveled through Europe meeting and purchasing. This included meeting authors of the time such as Erasmus and Thomas More. Hernando included buying prints and various illustrations. He included everything that offered new ways of thinking. His path crossed Durer's in his own travels, and Hernando sought out those prints. There were other collections at the time, but Hernando was different in that he included popular printings of tracts ad pictures, the equivalent in these times of saving comic books as they were first printed. He included writings in many different languages. As he did so, he searched for ways to organize these collections, cataloguing as he went from city to city in Renaissance Europe. At one point, most of the collection sank with the boat that carried it. Hernando still had the list, which he called the "Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books ". Hernando was different from his father in many ways, but he shared his determination. Hernando just continued collecting and cataloguing. Hernando had beeb there when his father arrived back after his first voyage, and then accompanied him on subsequent voyages. His extraordinary collecting started watching his father who gathered in his "Book of Prophecies" quotations and material that foretold his voyages being monumental, even mystical in their bringing the Christian God (and the Spainish Empire) to this new land. Columbus was not always welcome back to Spain as described in this history, and had to struggle to keep his family's claim to wealth from the voyages. Hernando picked up this struggle after his father's death, and eventually wrote a biography that definitely told only part of the story, but which eventually shaped the way Columbus was seen for many centuries. Perhaps the most important theme in this book was Hernando's efforts to organize the library. He made some bad decisions about separating the languages, which had consequences as to how other knowledges were perceived in Europe. But Hernando eventually created what amounted to cards for each volume with various pieces of information about them, including summaries (Book of Epitomes). This was a first kind of card catalogue, and as described by Wilson-Lee, what he wanted was a data base and search engine. Hernando lived in the thick of things in incredibly exciting and tumultuous times for Europe and the world. There are many more historial figures brought to life by the author, some of whom I had not previously heard of. Columbus's story is still being hashed out. The fate of Hernando's fabulous library I will leave for you to read in this absorbing book. ...more

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Feb 26, 2020 Rob rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, biography, history, sea-vessel-books, science, unabridged-audio, books-about-books, british-authors, libraries

Ok so maybe more of a 2.5. I can't really say I liked this book, but it had a certain level of quality and academic rigor which placed it far above the typical 2 star book. This tale was extremely dry and, for me, quite boring. I'm into the history of libraries, books, the storage and dissemination of information, etc. This book was much less about that than the subtitle implies it would be. At least 15 percent of the book is about the life of Columbus which is of negative interest to me. And mu ...more

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Dec 23, 2019 Al Berry rated it liked it

An okay book that tries to ride two horses; Columbus and his voyages of exploration as well as his son’s efforts at building a library. It was interesting and I learned a lot, but it wasn’t really a cohesive book.

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Aug 08, 2020 Debra Belmudes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A very interesting look at the life of Hernando Colon, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. From his childhood, Colon was fascinated with making lists ... from common everyday things to the strange plants and peoples he encountered on his voyages with his father. He began collecting a massive collection of books from all over the world and again, applied his skills of listmaking and categorizing in an effort to catalog his book collection.

Colon would spend his life re-doing and expandin ...more

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Jul 26, 2019 Karima rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Astounding! Who knew? Not I.
This is a biography of Hernando Colon (1488-1539), the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506).
Hernando's mission was to collect every printed material he could get his hands on. This included not only books but music scores, maps, pamphlets, images, letters, playbills, street postings, even a menu from a feast thrown by Pope Leo X featuring figs in muscatel, cockerel testicles and roasted peacocks “sewn back into their skins, to appear living.”
This book ...more

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May 03, 2020 Rachel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, books, libraries

History, books, catalogues, indexes, biography - all in one book! I enjoyed the mixture of all of these, particularly as I previously knew nothing about Hernando, the son of Christopher Columbus. The scene setting, political, geographical and intellectual was very evocative, moving around some of the most powerful European cities and courts of the early 1500s.

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Apr 05, 2019 Pamela rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non_fiction, type-pre_pub, biography, books, a-long-time-ago, history_where-what

The book was frustrating at times. It meandered and wasn't focused enough. In the places where the focus was retained, such as on Hernando Colón and his some of his projects, the book was fascinating. But it wandered, and at times seemingly for no reason, although occasionally it did add useful context to the biography.

Hernando Colón was the infamous Christopher Columbus's younger son. He also wrote a biography of his father which has been the vital book that created the legacy of Columbus. Yet ...more

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Mar 17, 2019 Jeimy rated it liked it

I disagree with the description of this book. Specifically, the part that reads, "this book follows Hernando Columbus’ bibliomania and curation of the first ever library of its kind." That statement should explain that the book uses Columbus's story as a tree trunk from which the ideas for chapters branch out. While the author did not spend as much time talking about the library as I had hoped, the book still painted a fascinating picture of what life was like at that time. ...more

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Jul 23, 2020 Karna Converse rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Heavily researched, action-packed story about Hernando Colón, his collection of literary works, and the library system he developed

When he was thirteen years old, Hernando joined his father, Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage to the New World (1502-1504). Prior to this, he served as a page in Prince Juan's household and was tasked with keeping the household books, ordering the prince's possession in a series of lists. That experience, and Hernando's continuation of a project h Heavily researched, action-packed story about Hernando Colón, his collection of literary works, and the library system he developed

When he was thirteen years old, Hernando joined his father, Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage to the New World (1502-1504). Prior to this, he served as a page in Prince Juan's household and was tasked with keeping the household books, ordering the prince's possession in a series of lists. That experience, and Hernando's continuation of a project his father had titled "Book or collection of auctoritates (authoritative writings), sayings, opinions and prophecies concerning the need to recover the Holy City and Mount Zion, and the finding and conversion of the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations" laid the foundation for a lifetime of extensive travel and learning.

By age 33, Hernando owned one of the greatest private literary collections in Europe—more than 6,000 books, pamphlets, prints, and pieces of music. More impressive, however, is the organizational structure he created that turned his collection into a universal library—one that housed related books together and allowed for sorting books by their differences.

"Hernando's greatest ambition," writes Wilson-Lee,"—to create a repository of all the written knowledge of the world, searchable by key word, navigable through short summaries, an sortable by different criteria—represents an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, and databases that was to emerge almost five centuries later."

Wilson-Lee supplements his heavily footnoted, detailed accounts of Hernando's travels with illustrations and summaries of the materials he collected and (historians assume) read—inviting today's reader to walk the streets of 1500 Europe and to sail across the oceans toward the discoveries of the New World.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books was chosen for me by my local bookseller as part of a mystery bag purchase. She chose well!
...more

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Jul 29, 2019 Daniel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, biography, history

This review originally published in Looking FOr a Good Book. Rated 4.5 of 5

Hernando Colón had a passion for books and a vision for an organized library. Hernando Colón was also Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son.

Author/researcher Edward Wilson-Lee does a tremendous, detailed job of tracking down this story and getting in-depth on Hernando's story.

While the name Christopher Columbus is known by every American school child, we know so little about him (other than what every fourth-grader lear This review originally published in Looking FOr a Good Book. Rated 4.5 of 5

Hernando Colón had a passion for books and a vision for an organized library. Hernando Colón was also Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son.

Author/researcher Edward Wilson-Lee does a tremendous, detailed job of tracking down this story and getting in-depth on Hernando's story.

While the name Christopher Columbus is known by every American school child, we know so little about him (other than what every fourth-grader learns in our white-washed history books), so just learning about this child sets us up for a number of fascinating insights.

While Hernando is an illegitimate child, Columbus still took him along on his fourth voyage to the New World (Hernando would have been thirteen at the time). This could well have been the spark that led Colón to a life of pursuing knowledge. He searched for books, in all languages, and he collected maps and art portfolios, searching through small booksellers' collections on his varied trips. This led to his organization a catalog of his books - a way for him to determine whether or not a particular volume or work of art was already in his collection. It was because of this new method of cataloging that when a shipwreck occurred and Colón lost thousands of books at sea, he knew which ones needed to be replaced. And it was because of his vast collection of maps, as well as his familiarity with his father's travels, that Colón was asked to step in to create a map - the final, authoritative map - of the New World so that Portugal and Spain could once and for all settle on territorial rights.

But it was at this time that Hernando was also quite familiar with his father's fall from grace and standing - how Spain tried to take his discovery away from him - to honor other explorers, which would also take away the inheritance of Columbus's legitimate heirs.

This book is amazing. I think I learned more history and more sociology and more library science through this one book than I have in a very long time.

In many respects, the book has more history/biography about Columbus than I was hoping for. It was definitely a great lesson in history - I'd had no idea that Columbus lost so much favor - but what attracted me to the book was the idea of the development of the early library. These moments in the book ... the revelation of Colón's passion for books and his search to constantly improve his library ... were not only the reason I started this, but the best moments of the book.

Looking for a good book? If you like history, if you like learning something very new about something very old, if the history of the printed word fascinates you, then The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee is a book you really ought to read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.
...more

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Nov 09, 2019 William Schram rated it liked it

Shelves: books-about-books, history, non-fiction, biography

Hernando Colón was a man obsessed. He wanted to create something akin to the Internet back in the Age of Sail. While I say the Internet, it would be more accurate to say that Colón wanted to build a complete repository of knowledge. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is written by Edward Wilson-Lee and recounts the hefty task that lay ahead of Colón and his eventual failure due to age and various misfortunes.

What was Colón’s plan you may ask? It was nothing less than the gathering of every piece ...more

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Oct 08, 2020 Valerie Kyriosity rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks

This started off really exciting with stuff about Hernando Columbus's library, then went on for-ev-er about boring stuff like exploration and battles and life-and-death adventure. But when it finally got back to the books, it was great! 😉

Christopher was a bit of a megalomaniac. His older, legitimate son was a bit of a jerk. And Hernando, the younger, illegitimate boy, was more than a bit of a bibliophile. He made a pretty impressive stab at assembling a truly comprehensive library at a time whe ...more

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Mar 12, 2019 Rhiannon Johnson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Read my full review on my blog: https://ivoryowlreviews.blogspot.com/...

**I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review**

I now have a special place in my heart for Hernando Colón. His collections and organizational systems are totally mind-boggling and absolutely fascinating. As a "natural son" (not the product of a legitimate union) Colón could "win legitimacy only by showing himself to be his father's son in spirit." Colón strove to achieve this distinction ...more

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Aug 25, 2020 Christopher rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An astonishing and wonderful account of the life of Christopher Columbus’s youngest son, Hernando, whose ambition to create a library of all the knowledge in the world, organized and searchable, anticipated modern libraries and databases by five centuries. Although his collection of around 20,000 items has mostly been lost, it represented one of the high points of Renaissance humanism in its breadth and scope. Highly recommended!

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Nov 17, 2020 David rated it liked it

While I didn't agree with all of the author's conclusions regarding Christopher Columbus, I found the material covering Hernando's efforts to collect, catalogue, and organize his library fascinating. I wish more of the book was devoted to this subject; I love history, and the time period covered in this book was interesting, but it seemed like there was more space devoted to other history than to Hernando himself, and specifically his library. ...more

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