I was intrigued--Columbus had a son who created the world's greatest library? Why hadn't we heard about him? What happened to all the books? How did he even embark on such a quest? I had to read this book.

Hernando may have been an illegitimate son but in 1502 his father Christopher Columbus took the thirteen-year-old along on his fourth voyage to the New World. Hernando started his life familiar with lands and cultures that most of the world didn't even know existed.

The book recounts Columbus's discoveries and his struggle to maintain his status and share of New World wealth for his heirs.

The Admiral of the Ocean reigned as the greatest explorer for only a short time before he was dethroned. He became old news as successive explorers stole attention and acclaim. Spain sought to discredit Columbus as the first to discover the New World, desirous of keeping all the New World wealth. Hernando determined to return and solidify his father's status by writing a book about his father's life--essentially the first biography.

The other part of the book is Hernando's thirst for knowledge, his obsession with collecting books of every kind, in every language--even if he couldn't read them. He collected prints and maps and art and ephemera gleaned from small booksellers.

He kept lists of his books and when he lost over a thousand books in a shipwreck he knew which ones he needed to replace. He developed methods to catalog and organize the books and to retrieve the information in the books.

Hernando was called upon to create a definitive map of the New World so that Spain and Portugal could finalize their territorial rights. He began an exhaustive dictionary but abandoned it knowing he could never finish it.

As he traveled across Europe, Hernando came into contact with all the great thinkers whose ideas were rocking the world: Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, Thomas More. During Hernando's lifetime, Henry was looking to divorce Catherine, Suleiman was conquering the Eastern reaches of Europe, and the Holy Roman Emperor was crowned as the head of church and state. Luther's teaching had fueled the Peasant's Revolt and the anti-authoritarian Anabaptist movement arose.

In his later life, Hernando settled down and built his house and perfected his library. His garden was an arboretum containing plants and trees from across the world.

Hernando's achievement was remarkable. His goal to order all human knowledge for accessible retrieval was monumental. But after his death, most of his work and library were lost to neglect and time.

Through the life of one man, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books gave me a panoramic view of the 16th c., an overview of the life and achievements of Christopher Columbus, and a biography of his son Hernando.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Yes, my neverending thirst / love for Latin American history made me pick this up. The son of Christopher Columbus would feed me something surely. But reading the blurb on the back, it was not to be so. This was something else entirely. Hernando’s life was fascinating and as exotic as his fathers, despite seemingly being completely different.

He accompanied his more famous father around the Caribbean, and there was details here of Columbus that I did not know, but he was not an action man in the same way as his father, who drove obsessively and then fought to retain the recognition and reward he felt he deserved, a task that Hernando spent much of his life continuing, writing a biography of his father that brought him to life for later generations.

In fact ‘bookish’ is perhaps a term that would be more suited to describe Hernando. Books became an obsession of his, and he bought hundreds of books, manuscipts and pamphlets wherever he went, either travelling with them or having them shipped to his home. It was this collection that was to form the basis of the project that would dominate his later life, a library containing a copy of every book in the world. Indeed when a shipment of these books en route to Hernando ends up at the bottom of the sea, the manifest containing the books gives this book it’s title, in a somewhat touching tribute, as a book lover myself, I could understand the loss that Hernando felt at the time.

But it wasn’t just the books, a cataloguing system to keep track and find the books was devised, in the most analog form of a search engine you will ever find. It was his mind so enmeshed in the smallest details that also enabled Hernando to compile a dictionary, involve himself in the creation of the first modern world maps and create a detailed encyclopedia of Spain at the time.

Hernando strived in his life to be ambitious, and while it seems that the biography of his famous father actually has helped to keep Hernando in the shadow of the explorer, the son can still stand tall on his achievements, and they are all detailed in a captivating way by Wilson-Lee here.
(blog review here)

This was kind of a slog for me at times, but it was informative about why Spain and Italy prioritized exploration during the Renaissance.

I could not get into this book. When reading a biography, I like to become acquainted with the subjects, and read about their exploits in somewhat chronological order. Instead, we get information dumps, asides, frequent flashes forward and backward in time, and remarks that appear to be aimed at someone far more aware of Columbus, Hernando, and their society than I am.

The contrast is especially big compared to my recent read of “Nobel Streven”, which meandered in places, but stuck to the chronology and was written for non-historians.

Fascinating story about Columbus, his son, and their library. Very good narrator.

Interesting and a bit dry (I skimmed the last 50 pages). I learned so many things about Columbus and his son Hernando.

Summary: The fascinating history of Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son Hernando, guardian of his father's flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogue supreme, whose travels took him to the heart of 16th-century Europe.

Another fantastic book in the vein of Deuel's The Testaments of Time and Moller's The Map of Knowledge, about the history of knowledge and our records of it, and how to organize books - this one focused mostly on Hernando, Christopher Columbus' natural son (don't blame him for his parentage!), and his quest to organize and preserve knowledge in a truly universal library system - a theme found over and over again in the books I mentioned, and this book points out that the dream was not possible to realize until the age of digitization - Google alone accomplished more of Hernando's dream than his lifetime of work. Anyway, definitely worth reading if you enjoy books and the history of them!

The premise: Partly a biography of Hernando Colon, son of Christopher Columbus and his father’s first biographer; partly an account of Hernando’s attempt to build the first truly universal library.

How I’d (cynically) sell it: Fans of Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, as well as people who get nerdy about the history of information technology, might like this.

The good bits: Some great analogies drawn between the idea of the universal library and the Internet. Hernando Colon’s life also happens to have been rather colourful: he first went to the New World as a teenager, and inherited a lot of his father’s personal drama (and lawsuits).

The bad bits: Not nearly enough about the intellectual connection between universal libraries and the Internet. To me this was the most interesting element of the book, and it felt very under-developed.

Verdict: Three stars (I’ve been sending it out steadily, but haven’t kept my hard copy).