![]() I was actually sitting on a beach in Kenya, where I grew up, at the time and I got an email about it and I just about dropped the phone in the ocean. there are some small pieces of the library which were considered to be lost forever. I spent six years living every day with Hernando - his whole story is fantastic. Suzanne Reitz/Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen and no one really knew what it was until Hernando's story started to become slightly more widely known, and they realized what they were holding.Ĭolón's guide to his massive personal library contains summaries of around 2,000 books. Arni Magnusson, appears to have bought Hernando's manuscript as part of a group of manuscripts because he wanted some of the other manuscripts in the same group. The person who collected this collection. So this is really a story of a book that was lost in the library, almost, because it was put on the wrong shelf. This collection in Denmark is mostly a collection of Icelandic manuscripts, and it's got a very small number of books that are not Icelandic - but because they are not Icelandic, people weren't really that interested in them. And then it goes missing shortly after Hernando's death in 1539 and isn't really heard of for almost 500 years, until about three weeks ago - it turned up in a library in Copenhagen. This book, the Libro de los Epítomes, which contained the summary of the books in the library, is mentioned in an account of the library by his last librarian. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. So he paid an army of readers to essentially read every book in the library and distill it down to a short summary so that this enormous library could be at the disposal of a single person who would be able to control it.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Subtitle Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library Author Edward Wilson-Lee One of the things that Hernando realized was that collecting every book in the world - and this was during the early age of print when the number of books was accelerating rapidly - collecting all these books wouldn't really be very useful if you didn't have some way to organize and distill them all. So Hernando was going to build a universal library that would circumnavigate the world of knowledge. And he very much saw this as a counterpart to his father's desire to circumnavigate the world. And so he undertook this bizarre, extraordinary project to build a universal library that would have every book in the world in it. Because the voyage in 1492 was successful, Hernando grew up with a fair amount of power and privilege - but because he was born out of wedlock, he never quite gained the levels of prominence that his father did.īut he always wanted to prove himself his father's son in spirit. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was born of an affair that Columbus had when he was kicking around the Spanish court still waiting for the patronage that would launch his voyage westward. Hernando was the second out-of-wedlock son of Christopher Columbus. ![]()
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