Hernando Colón's New World of Books recontextualizes the famed bibliographer and his library as a study in information organization and tools. Colón's intellectual agenda was vast: to create a universal library incorporating all human knowledge as well as multiple catalogues and registers to identify and cross-reference that knowledge. For a brief period at the beginning of the sixteenth century, such a venture would have seemed ambitious but, perhaps, possible; the expanding scale of early print, however, quickly made it impossible. Nonetheless, by the time of his death in 1539, his collection consisted of some fifteen thousand volumes, making it one of the largest libraries of its day. The five chapters that make up the bulk of this book serve to examine Colón's library through explicating his purchasing and organization practices as derived from extant records. Five appendixes of primary sources—including the Memoria of Colón's assistant/librarian Juan Pérez, Colón's will, and various other documents—are presented in English translation with brief notes. It is worth noting here that this book is largely designed for a popular audience, and its scholarly apparatus is accordingly abbreviated although still useful.
In the first chapter, “Life in the Library,” Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee argue that Colón's—or rather, Hernando's, as he is called familiarly throughout—vision of a universal library was itself an exercise in colonization for the early modern European mind. This is a fascinating point that is then left alone. The next chapter, “Trade Secrets,” examines sixteenth-century book trades and the blossoming of cheap print with its attendant new genres and formats in the context of Colón's purchases for his library. “Cartography” analyzes Colón's work as a cartographer against the broader landscape of maps as information organization, and how the tools of cartography translated into bibliographic cataloging. “New World Order” examines Pérez's Memoria and the records of Colón's library to identify how it was organized and contextualizes his model of library organization against others that were extant at the time. The final chapter, “After Hernando,” traces the dismantlement of the library as the collection is ingested into other institutions after Colón's death and as various volumes are expurgated by the Inquisition. This final study is absolutely fascinating and would have made an interesting book in its own right.
There are some fascinating nuggets to be mined from this work. For instance, Colón's expansive book buying (including an enviable 182 books one day in 1521) was enabled by booksellers willing to charge by the page rather than by volume: “his negotiated rate . . . meant that his 200 Grimaldi ducats would have translated into 59,840 pages” (79). Colón was fascinated by obrezillas, ephemeral publications that included reports of current events, popular ballads, and erotica, and especially prognostici, or predictions of future events. Records indicate that Colón had pamphlets of true events and predicted events bound together, indicating a continuity of time and of history that the authors argue was foundational to his vision of the universal library. The authors also argue that printed books, in the minds of Colón and his contemporaries, shared an identity of duplication utterly distinct from other bibliographic copied material due to the mechanics of print technology.
Reading this book invites thought into the architectures of knowledge and how they are constructed: surely the most relevant and topical of ambitions. Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee are redoubtable scholars treading on ground they clearly know well, but this familiarity does not always translate seamlessly to the reader. Some points are belabored (the universal library as a humanist exercise), while others are not made at all (the authors note that Colón's was the first library in the New World, and it would have been nice if the intellectual colonization inherent in this observation could have been made clearer). All the same, this study is a dense and illustrative model that will be of use to students of library and book history.
