The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

I use Shepherd.com as a research tool, to track down books on topics on which I am writing lectures or books. In the course of researching on Shepherd for a project on Columbus, I came across Wilson-Lee’s book.

To my joyful surprise, it turned out to be not only useful to my work, but an absolute pleasure to read.  Wilson-Lee’s writing is erudite and scholarly, and he shows a keen eye for fascinating digressions (the footnotes are as compelling as the main text). 

Yet he also writes with wit and elegance, maintaining subtle narrative tension, and effortlessly bringing the reader… show more.

What do you do if your father has just discovered whole new continents? In the case of Hernando, son of Christopher Columbus, the answer was to conquer a new world of his own: the new universe of printed books. In this beautifully written and accessible study, Edward Wilson-Lee explores Hernando’s quixotic yet determined attempt to emulate the library of ancient Alexandria by creating a universal library of print. It does not end well.

Hernando Columbus, the illegitimate son of Christopher, seems like a character straight out of a Jorge Luis Borges short story: an extraordinary collector (even hoarder) of books and the founder of a labyrinthine library (the remnants of which are now in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville Cathedral). The book is chockful of delightful anecdotes and sharp observations thanks to Wilson-Lee’s unerring eye for the many eccentricities of Hernando who, with his magnificent obsession, voyaged, like his father, across the frontiers of knowledge.