Edward Wilson-Lee

THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS tells the scarcely believable––and wholly true––story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library that would harness the vast powers of the new printing presses and bring every book in the world together in his library in Seville. In service of this he spent his life travelling through Europe, scouring the bookstores of the day for every available title, and thinking all the while of how he could harness this flood to the best advantage. Hernando was one of the first and greatest visionaries of the print age, someone who saw how the scale of available information would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. But the library he produced was much more than just an information-crunching machine: it was an artefact moulded by his life and the age in which he lived. During his immensely eventful life he spent years travelling in the New World, during one of which he lived with his father on a shipwreck off Jamaica, created a dictionary and a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain, helped to create the first modern maps of the world, spent time in almost every major European capital, and associated with many of the great people of his day, from Ferdinand and Isabel to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Dürer. He wrote the first biography of his father, almost single-handedly creating the legend of Columbus that held sway for many hundreds of years, and was highly influential in crafting how Europe saw the world his father reached in 1492. He also amassed the largest collection of printed images and of printed music of the age, started what was perhaps Europe's first botanical garden, and created by far the greatest private library Europe had ever seen, dwarfing with its 15,000 books every other library of the day. This first major modern biography of Hernando––and the first of any kind available in English––tells an enthralling tale of the age of print and exploration, a tale with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution and Globalisation.