The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library

"Yes, this comes a little out of left field. It’s more of a scholarly book than the previous ones. Edward Wilson-Lee is a professional academic who teaches English literature at Cambridge. He’s not a historian, if that matters. The reason this book is in here is, first and foremost, it’s a brilliant book. Even aside from what it tells us about Columbus, it’s magnificent. He picks a surprising topic that you wouldn’t think would support a whole book, which is the library created by Columbus’s youngest son—not the oldest son Diego, who inherited all the legacy, and from whom the Columbus dynasty descended (there’s even a Christopher Columbus today who is a nobleman in Spain, the 20th Admiral of the Open Sea)—but the illegitimate Hernando. You’d think: that’s an obscure topic, how’s he going to have the material to support that? But Wilson-Lee is very clever. He goes through the books themselves, talks about the library, and what it tells us about Hernando, and then his father. So, we get to a new way of thinking about Columbus, and a new way of unpacking the mythology about Columbus along the way, although that’s not Wilson-Lee’s primary purpose. Sometimes people who love books also love reading books about books. This is a book about books, and as such it is unique and engaging. To recommend to you five biographies of Columbus would be tedious, and after a while you’d just lose interest. Thus, I wanted to include something that comes from a different angle, and does tell you about Columbus, but also broadens the subject out, to get you thinking differently about the 15th and 16th centuries. Columbus himself died in 1506, so he’s not much of a 16th-century figure. But of course, his son was, and this helps us understand how Columbus was seen in the 16th century. And that leads us towards my fifth book, which is how Columbus was seen in the 20th century."