An Obscure and Timeless Manuscript

"Realistically, it's [the ambition to collect every book every published in a single, privately-held collection] not doable. There were too many cities printing too many books."
"It's great to have it all [an immense library representing the sum total of all the world's published books], but it's pointless if you can't find your way around it [know where each book is in its specialty niche, filed in order and readily retrieved]. That's one of the great things about his thoroughness, and how meticulous he was. He annotated all his books the same way."
"When you see a book that belongs to him, you know right away. He always puts the call number in the same place, int he same way. Any scholar that was not familiar with Columbus's library and its very unique cataloguing and referencing system couldn't have recognized it [the "book of summaries"].
"I didn't know it was THE missing catalogue. I had found the only surviving copy. I didn't think for a second it would interest anybody. Most of us [historian-scholars] go through our entire careers looking at documents that interest our colleagues, a relatively small circle of scholars. I didn't really realize  how important it was, the magnitude when I saw it."
Guy Lazure, historian, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario

The Libro de los Epítomes, a manuscript summarizing the contents of Christopher Columbus' son's library, was discovered at the University of Copenhagen. ( Suzanne Reitz/Arnamagnæan Institute)

"It's an extraordinary object. He was trying to prove himself his father's legitimate spiritual heir even if he wasn't his father's legitimate son by building a universal library which had every book in the world in it."
"He personally went around and bought books on these extraordinary book shopping sprees where he was purchasing thousands of titles at a time."

"How print really revolutionized the world was by making it possible to distribute cheap print — you know, information in news sheets and popular ballads and erotica and weather forecasts and things like that. But no one at the time actually thought of collecting this stuff."

"This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is. Instead of saying ‘knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people’, he’s doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there." "It’s much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information. This is a model of knowledge that says, 'We’re going to take the breadth of print – ballads and pornography and newsletters – and not exclude that from the world of information'."

Edward Wilson-Lee, literature professor, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, U.K. 

Books have a special place in the human imagination; books that chronicle history, botany, medicine, science, geography, wars, and human experience. Novels are actually chronicles of human experience. One of the most serious crimes against intellectual freedom was to condemn certain books as unworthy of existence, and to destroy them. Bonfires to burn books proscribed by dictatorial regimes, libraries, like the fabled library at Alexandria, Egypt with its vast collection of manuscripts of the ancient world represented an irreplaceable loss when it was burned in 48BC as an act of war.

Bibliophiles and just ordinary people who love reading books aspire to own their own libraries of books. They provide education and entertainment for the fertile mind, eager to learn. Ownership of a vast store of books enables a busy mind to take its choice of stimulation at any given time, but it is entirely feasible that private libraries holding copies of classic literature as well as scholarly treatises, histories and technical books will never be entirely read; the human trait of acquisitiveness leads people to amass collections and take pride in them.

Printing Press - HISTORY

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Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son took his inner resources in a direction to explore that which appeals to the human mind and spurs the imagination, just as  his father used vast material resources in his exploration and discovery trips around the unknown Americas. He was said to have acquired a library of 20,000 books of his day representative of every book ever published, but not actually every book ever published was represented in his collection; some 4,000 volumes remain in existence now, housed in the cathedral in Seville, Spain.

Professor Guy Lazure had gone to Copenhagen for a research project looking for a manuscript in a Scandinavian archive, holding some 20 books from 15th-Century Spain. Known to be an expert in the history of Seville the archive's director asked if he would examine whether within that modest collection anything of note was represented. A massive book of 973 folded leaves of paper with close to 2,000 pages caught his interest, as perhaps representing an index but it had no title page, no author credit and no indication what the tome might represent, much less why it would be among old Icelandic and Scandinavian literature.

It took him a bit of thought before the realization struck that he had come across the only surviving copy of two originals of the collection of summaries of Hernando Colón's collection of summaries of his book collection, called the Libro de los Epitomes; "book of summaries". A Danish ambassador to Spain in the 17th Century bought it from a Spanish noble at a time of economic decline in Spain. It languished in obscurity ever since, its historical value and provenance unrecognized. This discovery was made in 2013, when Professor Lazure spent a few hours poring over the vast manuscript.

It was only much, much later, when his attention focused on a biography written by a colleague of his, Edward Wilson-Lee, in his The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books that focuses on this story of the vast book collection, that it dawned on Professor Lazure that his experience and discovery had great current importance. Out of this coincidental discovery has come a resolve to digitize the manuscripts for a virtual reconstruction. It will be done eventually, as long as the financing becomes available.

Hernando Colón was the son of Christopher Columbus, born out of wedlock and therefore not his father's heir. (Insitucíon Colombina, Seville)