The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Edward WilsonLee
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Edward WilsonLee
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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books
Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library

Author: Edward Wilson-Lee

Narrator: Richard Trinder

Unabridged: 11 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/12/2019


Synopsis

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern.

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection.

“Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.

About Edward Wilson-Lee

Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. His research focuses on books, libraries, and travel, which during this project has involved journeys to and through Spain, Italy, India, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Shakespeare in Swahililand and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lissa

At about page fifty I found myself asking whether this book was fact or fiction because it was so fabulous in the telling. It is described of as a biography of Christopher Columbus's son Hernando Colon, but fails in the usual sense of a biography because it is really the story of a library Colon col......more

Goodreads review by Matt

This is a book that will ruin at least the next 3 books I read... it's so good that nothing else will hold up by comparison! It combines exploration, European Renaissance history, and philosophy of information in one endlessly fascinating package. I never knew about Hernando Colon, Christopher Colum......more

A historian, no matter how meticulous, connects with a general audience only when he feels the confidence to invest something of himself. It's a confidence based on erudition, not, as in the case of pareidolia, of temperament or impulse. Although he is referring to his subject Hernando Colón (favori......more