the catalogue of shipwrecked books (edward wilson-lee)

Wilson-Lee’s book succeeds in incorporating a ranch of fascinating material. It recounts the life of Hernando Colón, Colombus’ second and youngest son, who, having travelled with his father to the newly discovered Americas in 1502, subsequently set about creating the biggest, most diverse library in the western world. Hernando did this at a time when printing was in the process of growing exponentially. His mission, according to Wilson-Lee, was positively Borgesian. It was to construct a repository of the world’s knowledge, not just from within christendom, but from every corner of the globe. The inference here is that Hernando’s knowledge of his father’s journeys, as well as his personal experiences of the Americas, meant that he was able to conceive the importance of embracing the multiple cultures of the expanding world which was only just starting to become known. (A fascinating side-note to Hernando’s library was his garden, created on the banks of the Ebro in Sevilla, where he cultivated many plants from the Americas, among other sources.) As such, Hernando represents one of Europe’s first globalised minds, as well as constructing a knowledge-base which prefigured the arrival, centuries later, of the World Wide Web.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books exudes scholarship, as the author investigates and imagines the contents of the library, much of which has since been lost. However, as much as anything else, this is an intriguing study of a man at the centre of a world perched on the brink of a radical transformation, one whose effects were being processed by European societies struggling to come to terms with the forces unleashed at the close of the fifteenth century. Hernando’s quixotic response, one that sought to consolidate and protect not just the world’s extant printed knowledge, but the very idea of knowledge itself, comes across as a heroic and progressive reaction. The significance of ‘the book’ as a pillar of society, is one that has been constantly threatened. Not for nothing is the image of book-burning associated with an idea of bringing down the classical conception of a knowledge based society, to replace it with one of superstition and conspiracy.