The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee: book review

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018) is set in Spain and begins in 1539 with the death of Hernando, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus.

Hernando Columbus (1488-1539), also known as Ferdinand, born in Argentina, collected books, and on his death he left his worldly possessions and wealth, not to a person, but to his library collection. The novel goes back to the beginning of Hernando’s life, to the age of five, and how he acquired his amazing collection of 15,000 books. It is his personal destiny.

He spent a year of his youth with his father, shipwrecked off Jamaica. He also travelled around Europe. But mostly he was in Seville where, with his printing press, he helped to create maps of the world, a dictionary, and a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain. Unlike his father who travelled the world, Hernando wanted to bring the world, and knowledge, to one place, in his library in Seville, Spain.

Hernando wrote a book called Life and Deeds of the Admiral, a biography of his father, from which modern historians learned of Christopher Columbus and his travels. He also inherited his father’s library.

No matter how many books a person has, ‘even fifty thousand books without order is not a library, any more than a crowd of thirty thousand undisciplined men is an army.’ So, around the turn of the 16^thcentury, Hernando set about cataloguing his books, meticulously. How does one order a library – chronologically? Is literature linear?

The house and his library of shipwrecked books, no longer exists. The Epilogue provides the reasons why.

This is a fascinating account of a dry subject – the establishment and ordering of a library – made interesting through the extensive travels, the biography of Christopher Columbus, and the love of literature.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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