Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Toward a Cartography of Knowledge

Abstract

José María Pérez Fernández (professor of English at the University of Granada, Spain) and Edward Wilson-Lee (fellow and lecturer in English at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge, England) collaborated on this thoroughly researched monograph of Hernando Colón’s sixteenth-century private library. Additionally, Wilson-Lee recently published a closely examined biography of Hernando Colón entitled The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2019). NOTE: This monograph was also published as The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Search for a Universal Library (William Collins, 2018).Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee are in lockstep about the focus of Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: “In this volume we aim to provide for the first time a comprehensive account of Hernando’s many projects—in cosmography, cartography, lexicography, and bibliography, bringing together plants and prints, demographic records, and sailors’ reports and books—and to locate them all within the intellectual, technological, and social currents of their day” (9). The authors succeed in achieving this feat. Through the use of primary sources that have been translated into English, the reader follows the life and multifaceted career of Hernando Colón in an easy-to-follow yet scholarly style.Hernando Colón was the youngest son of Christopher Columbus and Beatriz Enriquez de Arana. Hernando and his brother served as pages in the royal court of Infante Juan, thanks to their father’s association with the royal house and his renown as Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Colón’s education at court greatly influenced his worldview. He became a prolific book collector with the vision of developing a universal library. Colón had no filter when it came to what type of material he would consider purchasing; he wanted to acquire everything. While other private libraries in Europe held focused collections on religious treatises or narrow subject areas, Colón’s acquisitions were much broader in nature and scope. During his lifetime he amassed about fifteen thousand books, which he meticulously cataloged. When a large shipment of books was lost at sea in transit from Italy to Spain, Colón knew which ones perished because of the catalog he had already created; he then worked from this inventory to try to reacquire copies of his lost material. Wilson-Lee writes about this event extensively in The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee provide a historical overview of the wide range of events occurring during Colón’s lifetime that have become the mainstays of our Western history, culture, and values. The “world” in the first quarter of the sixteenth century is expanding: Spain and Portugal are colonizing parts of Central and South America; Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, has taken control of Rhodes and is pressing westward to Europe; and Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese-born navigator, has been appointed by Spain to find a trade route to Asia through the Americas. At “home” in Europe, Copernicus suggests a heliocentric universe, which leads to controversy and the beginning of the scientific revolution; the Italian Renaissance is blooming with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who is painting the Mona Lisa; and the Reformation, fueled by Martin Luther’s teachings, is gaining a foothold in religious doctrine and pressing up against long-standing Roman Catholic Church power and tradition.While Shipwrecked Books is a biography of Colón, New World of Books is a treatise on the library that Colón built, including details about how the collection was cataloged and managed. We also learn about many of Colón’s other projects, including his attempt to build a Latin dictionary, his interest in gathering botanical specimens from around the world for his garden at Casa de Colón, and his tireless work to keep his father’s legacy and reputation as Admiral of the Ocean Sea in good stead even after his death. Many of these projects intersect with information management principles. Because Colón had a hand in directing and creating many bibliographic, cartographic, cosmographic, and lexicographic projects at the same time, he deserves both the literal and figurative moniker of “Renaissance man.”The monograph provides rich detail from his bibliographic catalogs and those created by his librarians, as well as from other primary and secondary sources; the majority of these are in Spanish and would not be accessible to non-Spanish-reading scholars and historians. The lack of translations of these sources may be the reason why I never learned about Colón in any history of librarianship course I attended in graduate school, nor why I had no inkling that Colón had been credited with documenting rules for alphabetization beyond the first letter, for instance. The latter occurred when he gathered data for Descripción y Cosmografía de España (Description and Cosmography of Spain) on the geography, climate, population, and local observations of places within Spain. Colón documented the procedure for the alphabetization of entries up to the fifth letter for this labor-intensive data-management project.Colón’s talent and skill as a cartographer and navigator proved useful to his work as a librarian. He took what he knew about mapmaking and incorporated best practices into how he managed his book collection. One of his borrowings from mapmaking practices was the use of symbols. Colón created his own shorthand, called biblioglyphs, for the types of metadata he would track from the books he acquired. Some of his commonly used symbols are detailed in chapter 4 and appendix 1.After Colón’s death in 1539, it was impossible to maintain his estate and library in the manner he had managed. Colón left the library to his nephew and others; yet the cold, hard fact is that no one cared more about Colón’s library than he did. The library was packed up and housed in various cathedrals and monasteries for the next few centuries. Each time an inventory was created, it was found to be shrinking—through theft, sale to others, neglect, weeding, censorship, decay, or damage from water, fire, insects, and mold. The details of these losses were dismal news, yet there was not a good succession plan, even in the instructions he left in his will. The extant collection now consists of around four thousand items. Truly, this library built during the Renaissance receded to its own Dark Ages within a century or so. Currently, what remains of the Biblioteca Colombina is housed at the Seville Cathedral.The appendixes contain translations from several primary texts and are truly a treasure trove of historical documentation. I am grateful for access to these texts in English, and I appreciate reading beautiful examples of the florid, formal writing style, whether it appears in a report from the chief librarian that describes Colón’s book registers and catalogs; within King Charles V’s letters patent to Colón about his appointment to a government position; or in Colón’s own will, where he describes his wishes for the maintenance and continuation of the library.I highly recommend this monograph, as it contains unique research findings into private library development during the Renaissance.