Ferdinand Columbus

Collecting all the books in the world

Ferdinand Columbus (1488 – 1539)

Ferdinand Columbus (Spanish: Fernando Colón) son of Christopher Columbus, tried to collect all the books in the world.¹

And the catalog of these books, The Libro de los Epítomes (The Book of Epitomes), has only recently been rediscovered by Guy Lazure, a historian at the University of Windsor at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen.²

Ferdinand Columbus was a “bibliomaniac”

Having acquired over 15,000 printed books and manuscripts as well as around 3,200 sheets of prints by the time of his death in 1539, Ferdinand Columbus (Hernando Colón) is described as a “bibliomaniac” by Wilson-Lee in The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells the story of the first and greatest visionary of the print age, Ferdinand Columbus, the man who saw how the explosive expansion of knowledge and information generated by the advent of the printing press would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. He also happened to be Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son.

A library that would encompass the world

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, while his father sailed across the ocean to explore the boundaries of the known world, Ferdinand Columbus sought to build a library that would encompass the world and include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects.” He spent his life travelling - first to the New World with his father in 1502, surviving through shipwreck and a bloody mutiny off the coast of Jamaica, and later, throughout Europe, scouring the bookstores of the day at the epicenter of printing.

The magnitude of the library of Ferdinand Columbus was unparalleled in his day. The “classification systems that he devised to catalogue and access his collections was unique,” and are considered by some scholars to have laid the foundations of modern library cataloguing systems.³ In addition to keeping a register of accessions, he conceived four types of inventories to keep track of his books:

• a list of authors,

• a list of sciences (that is, subjects),

• a list of materials (that is, themes or keywords) and

• a list of epitomes, which contained detailed summaries of the contents of each of the books in the collection.

  All of these inventories could be cross referenced through numbers assigned to the books in each of the lists.⁴

During his life, Ferdinand Columbus was obsessed with theft, and in his will he described a novel arrangement for keeping the books in place without resorting to chains. ⁵

Biblioteca Colombina

In Seville much of the library survives, more or less intact, in the Institución Colombina next door to the cathedral in Seville.⁶

1. Arnamagnæan Institute (2021-05-10). "The Book of Books: Hernando Colón's Libro de los Epítomes". nors.ku.dk.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Wilson-Lee, Edward. 2019. The catalogue of shipwrecked books young Columbus and the quest for a universal library. London William Collins 2019.

I have the hope, should our Lord allow me life and opportunity, to build a [large room with] great cases up against the walls…with the books arranged in them…each with its title and number. And, six feet from the wall…will run all around a grille, so that whoever enters the room cannot touch the books. On the interior of this grille, facing toward the books, will be a shelf at a level similar to that found in bookshops, on which all the books on a subject will be placed [when needed. On the exterior of the grille, toward the middle of the room, there will be a bench a foot from the grille where visitors to the library can sit… In front of them there will be bars through which they can put their hands to turn the pages]… he who is charged to keep the library will place the requested book on the shelf [behind the grille] and return it to its place when the reader is finished. (From his will as quoted in Sherman, William H. 2016. “A New World of Books: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina.” in For the Sake of Learning : Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, edited by Ann Blair, and Anja-Silvia Goeing, BRILL.

5.

6. Klaus Wagner, La biblioteca colombina en tiempos de Hernando Colón (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1992); cf. José Fernández Sánchez, Historia de la bibliografía en España (Madrid: Ministerio Cultura, 1983).