This is a fascinating, albeit difficult to read book, subtitled, “Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library.” It is, in fact, a biography of Hernando Colon, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. (Colon is the Spanish form of the name. Columbus is Latin. The Italian version is Columbo.) The author, Edward Wilson-Lee, teaches English literature at Cambridge.
Most of what we know of the life of Christopher Columbus is due to Hernando, who spent much of his life in the shadow of his famous father. Hernando wrote the definitive biography of his father, much of it invented, and much of it defending his father’s legacy, which was often under attack, then as now.
The father’s stature in Spain was such that Hernando was raised as part of the Royal Court. Early on, he showed his skill as a maker of lists, catalogs, encyclopedias, and other organizational schemes. Hernando was growing up in the world about 50 years after the invention of the printing press and books were being published at a rate never seen previously.
Hernando was obsessed with taming this flood of knowledge through his organizational skills. But he didn’t limit himself to just books. He also wanted to collect and compile every print, every handbill, every map, every piece of sheet music…almost everything that was ink-on-paper.
As an adult, he crisscrossed Renaissance Europe on buying sprees. On one single visit to Venice, he purchased 1,637 books and other documents and arranged for their shipment home, while he continued north to buy more. But when he got home, he learned that his cache of books was on the bottom of the Bay of Naples; the ship carrying his precious cargo had sunk in a storm. Of course, he had a list of every item and attempted to replace them all. This list was the “catalogue of shipwrecked books.”
By the time he died, Hernando had built the largest private library in the world, with over 15,000 volumes. He called it the Biblioteca Hernandina. Not content with just gathering existing books, Hernando set up a system of buying books into the future and distilling their essence into several tools.
The library was to be the compilation of three great catalogues that Hernando had created: The Book of Epitomes, the Book of Materials and the Table of Authors and Sciences. The Book of Epitomes was a collection of summaries of a book’s content. The Book of Materials was a guide to key words. Together, they would allow users remote from the library to treat them much like a search engine. Hernando had engineered a system to draw in the knowledge of the world, to process it into indexes and epitomes that would make it useful, and then to redistribute it, creating a network that could access the immense realm of print.
The Table of Authors and Sciences, his last catalogue, provided a subject order that attempted to divide the library into manageable sections. The Table of Authors and Sciences wasn’t a book; it was scraps of paper with a wealth of information about each book. It was the first card catalog.
Hernando’s grandest ambition—to create a repository of all the written knowledge of the world, searchable by key word, navigable through short summaries, and sortable by different criteria, all accessible from points widely dispersed in space—represents an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, and databases that was to emerge almost five centuries later. While an amazing concept, Hernando’s idea really wasn’t possible until digitization of text and search algorithms.
The Google Books project took to complete in a few years much of the work that had been stalled for five centuries. This has largely been accomplished. Unfortunately, about half the information is hidden due to copyright laws.
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