![]() After Columbus’s death in 1506, the 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, the first ever search engine for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. “At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando traveled with Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. The book tells the extraordinary story of Hernando Colón. Lee, a Cambridge academic, is the author of the recently released biography of Colon titled The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Dr. But it was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first made the connection to Colón. “The idea that this object, which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project - and which one always thought of with a great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved– for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …” It simply lay virtually untouched for over three centuries. ![]() The funny thing is that nobody was looking for this book because historians and scholars assumed the massive collection had been destroyed. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.” Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. In the early 16th century, Colón made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known. ![]() “The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. What one could call “the holy grail of books” has been found in the Arnamagnæan Collection at the University of Copenhagen.
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