The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. Edward Wilson-Lee

      On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed. He told his servants that he was too weak to raise his arms and instructed them to rub the soil on his face. While many of them had been with him for a decade or more and were intensely loyal, they refused on this occasion to obey his orders, thinking he must finally have taken leave of his senses. Hernando mustered the strength he needed and reached into the bowl by himself, smearing his face with the silt of the Guadalquivir, the river that meandered through Seville and held his house in the crook of its arm. As he painted himself with mud, Hernando spoke some words in Latin that began to make sense of this performance for those who had gathered at his side: remember that you are dust, he said, and unto dust you will return. On the opposite bank of the river, Hernando’s father – Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea – had recently been raised from the same soil, from a grave in which he had lain for thirty years. If Hernando’s word is to be believed (and for many things in Columbus’ life we have only Hernando’s word) the men who opened his tomb may have been surprised to find, along with the explorer’s bones, a pile of chains. These chains were a link to a moment in Hernando’s past, when at twelve years old his mostly absent father appeared bound in them, returning as a prisoner from the paradise he looked upon as his discovery and his gift to Spain.1

      The meaning of the great explorer’s grave-goods, of these chains that he wished to be placed with him in his tomb, was something Hernando only divulged late in life, when he came to write his father’s story. But the dust with which he painted himself on the morning of his death would have made sense to all around him: it was a symbol of abject humility, humility he knew he could afford to vaunt because there was no doubt he had achieved something extraordinary. Hernando, the man who was welcoming his impending decay with open arms, had built an engine capable of withstanding for ever the onslaught of time. He died shortly after this performance, at eight o’clock in the morning.

      An hour later the next act in Hernando’s strange death pageant began. Those closest to him had gathered at his house for the reading of his will, reaching his Italianate villa by the river by passing through the Puerta de Goles (‘Hercules Gate’) and the garden of unknown plants. Hernando had an extraordinary memory, an obsession with lists, and a delicate conscience, so his will tabulated in minute detail the people to whom he felt he owed something, right down to a mule-driver whom he had short-changed nearly two decades previously. But after the tables of his conscience had been cleared, his testament moved on to its great crescendo, a declaration all but incomprehensible to his time. The main heir to his fortune was not a person at all, but rather his marvellous creation, his library. As this was the first time in living memory that someone in Europe had left their worldly wealth to a group of books, the act itself must have been somewhat confusing; but it was even harder to make sense of given the form of the library in question. Most of Hernando’s books were not like the precious manuscripts treasured by the great libraries of the day – venerated tomes of theology, philosophy and law, books that were often sumptuously bound to reflect the great value placed upon them. Instead, much of Hernando’s collection consisted of books by authors of no fame or reputation, flimsy pamphlets, ballads printed on a single page and designed for pasting on tavern walls, and other such things that would have seemed just so much trash to many of his contemporaries. To some eyes, the great explorer’s son had left a legacy of rubbish. Yet to Hernando these things were priceless because they brought him closer to the goal of a library that would collect everything, to become universal in a sense never before imagined. It was not even clear where this strange and multifarious collection began and ended: in addition to all these written works, there were chests and chests of printed images – the largest collection ever gathered – and more printed music than had ever been brought together before. As some accounts would have it, even the garden outside had begun to collect the plant life of the world and arrange it in its beds. There was, however, no word yet for such a botanical garden.2

      Visitors to the library would have been greeted by the strangest of sights. The scale of the collection must surely have been impressive, by far the largest private library of the day, blurring the vision as the number of individual items expanded beyond what could be taken in at a glance. Contributing to this disorientation, they might have noticed next that the walls of the library had disappeared. In their place were row upon row of books standing upright on their spines, stacked in this new vertical way in specially designed wooden cases. To the modern viewer these kinds of bookshelves are so familiar as to escape notice, but visitors to the library were encountering these as the first of their kind. This was just one of many elements in Hernando’s fabulous library design that defied explanation, beginning with the inscription at the entrance proudly declaring the edifice was founded on shit. Inside the library, the baffling marvels multiplied: the bookless cages in which readers were supposed to sit, the chests full of volumes that should be turned over two or three times a year but were not for reading, the bookshop of useless titles. Then there was the army of paid