The first universal library

Scholars were astonished this year when the Libro de los Epítomes — a handwritten catalog of an early 16th century library — surfaced in a Danish library. The 2,000 page book was written by Ferdinand Columbus, the son of famed explorer Christopher Columbus, and scholars he hired. It was a catalog of a “universal library” collected in the early decades of the 1500s and located in Seville, Spain. The library apparently had 15,000 to 20,000 books, of which only a fraction have survived.

Apparently Columbus was interested in all kinds of literature, including not only the well known religious documents of the era and the usual Greek and Roman classics, but also newspapers, handbills, contemporary poetry and newly written books, many of which are unknown today.

It was an attempt, as one US National Public Radio story noted, “to circumnavigate the world of knowledge.” According to Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books:

“The major question about the library which this book will help us to answer is how the exponentially rising amount of information during the age of print changed the way people organize knowledge about the world. … This will just get us that much closer to seeing how all of this information that wouldn’t have circulated publicly before changed his ways of thinking about the world.