Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

  The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son and the Quest To Build the World's Greatest Library   by Edward Wilson-Lee

      Hernando Colon was his father’s son. His father was determined to widen the world, forge new paths and bring untold riches and knowledge to the known world. And he did, in his way. Hernando’s father was Christopher Columbus. Hernando was the illegitimate son, but the one who matched his father in foresight and this is his story.

     Columbus’ dream was to find a quicker and easier way to bring the riches of India to Europe and make through his voyage everyone involved richer, himself, his monarchy, his country and the people. On his last voyage, Hernando traveled with his father and saw for himself what the world, both old and new, had to offer but it wasn’t gold so much as new knowledge.

     Hernando was only eighteen when his father died but the quest for the knowledge available to the world if only one could find it was so important to him he spent the rest of his life travelling the world and collecting books, paintings, sketches, pamphlets, writings of all kinds into the most monumental attempt at a personal library in the world. The thing that made his library most interesting was he was more interested in the little things, the mundane, the things people would eventually throw away, the things that revealed real people. Playbills, songs, ballads, bulletins, fables, sketchings, anything that represented everyday life, the big and the small were collected. He travelled Europe and visited bookshops and bought and bought and bought (what a guy!) It was to be a universal library.

     We think having the world and all of it’s offerings at our fingertips today commonplace. But in a world where anything out of the city’s gates was considered foreign and feared, the task Hernando set for himself was truly extraordinary.

     The remarkable things was the order he tried to maintain. What good is the information if you can’t find it? We all know what it’s like to search for something and grow frustrated because we just KNOW it’s there somewhere. Hernando was a list maker, a cataloger of all he owned and he didn’t skimp on his library. By the end of his life he had over 15,000 books, pamphlets, pieces of music, prints, anything and everything written down, that was his goal. It was a phenomenal achievement. And there was the shipwreck where part of his collection was lost. But even those titles were recorded so we do know what was lost.

     What a truly remarkable man was Hernando Colon, to live in a time when the world opened up and be there to receive it.