“Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.”
-Christopher Columbus
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books
by Edward Wilson-Lee
Reading this book is truly a delightful learning experience. The author, Edward Wilson-Lee, brings book collecting at its earliest, to life. By introducing Hernando Colon, illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, all bibliophiles find their roots.
Early Adventures
The original book hoarder with a plan, he single-handedly gathers documents, maps, books, papers, songs, etc to establish a collection of the world’s knowledge. Hernando is introduced to adventure and questing at the age of 13 when he accompanies his father on the fourth trip of Columbus’ exploration of the “New World.”
Quest for Knowledge
This trip lit a fire in the boy. Hernando becomes not only the keeper of his father’s memory and heritage, but the accumulator of his own ‘new world,” that of collective world knowledge at the street level. He gathers anything of interest or intellectual value in his estimation. While doing so he encounters the question of how to organize this mass of documentation and sets about devising a means to catalog and retrieve the information. Hernando creates book lists that were exhaustive. He uses these lists to determine what needed to be replaced when he lost one thousand books in a shipwreck.
Later Years
Hernando, a true man of the Renaissance spirit, accomplishes many noteworthy efforts in his lifetime. He writes the story of his father’s life, one of the first biographies. Later, he maps the New World for purposes of dividing it among the countries claiming rights. Additionally, he undertakes a dictionary of all terms, but abandons that before completion. For variety, he spends his later years collecting and cultivating plants from around the world.
All bibliophiles will appreciate the depth and detail provided by Wilson-Lee in celebrating the many accomplishments of Hernando Colon. What a unique and rewarding individual revealed through this thoroughly researched book. Although the topic is scholarly, it reads like a true page turner!
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