The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His

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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library

â€œLike a Renaissance wonder cabinet, full of surprises and opening up into a lost world.â€ â€”Stephen Greenblatt

â€œA captivating adventureâ€¦For lovers of history, Wilson-Lee offers a thrill on almost every pageâ€¦Magnificent.â€ â€”The New York Times Book Review

Named a Best Book of the Year by: * Financial Times * New Statesman * History Today * The Spectator *

The impeccably researched and vividly rendered account of the quest by Christopher Columbusâ€™s illegitimate son to create the greatest library in the worldâ€”â€œa perfectly pitched poetic dramaâ€ (Financial Times) and an amazing tour through sixteenth-century Europe.

In this innovative work of history, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the extraordinary story of Hernando ColÃ³n, a singular visionary of the printing press-age who also happened to be Christopher Columbusâ€™s illegitimate son.

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando traveled with Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbusâ€™s death in 1506, the eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continueâ€”and surpassâ€”his fatherâ€™s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues, the first ever search engine for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando restlessly and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include â€œall books, in all languages and on all subjects,â€ even material often dismissed as ephemeral trash: song sheets, erotica, newsletters, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522â€”documented in his poignant Catalogue of Shipwrecked Booksâ€”set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection.

Edward Wilson-Leeâ€™s account of Hernandoâ€™s life is a testimony to the beautiful madness of booklovers, a plunge into sixteenth-century Europeâ€™s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world today.

Country	USA
Author	Edward Wilson-Lee
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9781982111410
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Scribner
Manufacturer	Scribner
NumberOfPages	416
PublicationDate	2019-03-12
Publisher	Scribner
ReleaseDate	2019-03-12
Studio	Scribner

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library

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