Without libraries, what have we? We have no past & no future. This book tells for the first time in English the story of the first great universal library in the age of printing
- & of the son of Christopher Columbus who created it. This is the scarcely believable
- & wholly true
- story of Christopher Columbus` bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal & surpass his father`s achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain & himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world`s knowledge in one place, his library in Seville. Hernando was one of the first & greatest visionaries of the print age, someone who saw how the scale of available information would entirely change the landscape of thought & society. His was an immensely eventual life. As a youth, he spent years travelling in the New World, & spent one living with his father in a shipwreck off Jamaica. He created a dictionary & a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain, helped to create the first modern maps of the world, spent time in almost every major European capital, & associated with many of the great people of his day, from Ferdinand & Isabel to Erasmus, Thomas More, & Durer. He wrote the first biography of his father, almost single-handedly creating the legend of Columbus that held sway for many hundreds of years, & was highly influential in crafting how Europe saw the world his father reached in 1492. He also amassed the largest collection of printed images & of printed music of the age, started what was perhaps Europe`s first botanical garden, & created by far the greatest private library Europe had ever seen, dwarfing with its 15, 000 books every other library of the day. Edward Wilson-Lee has written the first major modern biography of Hernando
- & the first of any kind available in English. In a work of dazzling scholarship, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells an enthralling tale of the age of print & exploration, a story with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution & Globalisation.