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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Christopher Columbus's son (Hernando Colon) built 'the world's first search engine'
How Christopher Columbus's son built 'the world's first search engine'
In the 16th century, Hernando Colón amassed a library of unprecedented size and range. The author of a new biography tells its startlingly modern story
Changing the model of what knowledge is detail from portrait of Hernando Colón. Photograph: Biblioteca Colombina (Seville)
For 30 years, Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, travelled the world with a quest, albeit one very different to that of his coloniser father: to build the biggest library the world had ever seen. Between 1509 and his death in 1539, Colón travelled all over Europe in 1530 alone he visited Rome, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Turin, Milan, Venice, Padua, Innsbruck, Augsburg, Constance, Basle, Fribourg, Cologne, Maastricht, Antwerp, Paris, Poitiers and Burgos buying books everywhere he went and eventually amassing the greatest private library in Europe. Colóns aim, to create a universal library containing all books, in all languages and on all subjects, that can be found both within Christendom and without, has been charted for the first time in English in a forthcoming biography.
He had somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 books, says Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee. That maybe doesnt sound that big nowadays, but it was at least an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest libraries of the day. Most other people, even very bookish people, would have had a couple of hundred books. Other big collections of the day were around 3,000 this was at least five times as big. Wilson-Lee, whose biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, is published this month by William Collins, finds it astonishing that the bibliomaniacs story has not previously been told in English. This is a story that was known about, but largely only to a small group of Spanish book historians, he says. But this was a project that was very much the reciprocal of his fathers ideas about circling the world it was another millenarian grand project, to build this universal library.
Unlike most collectors of the day, who according to Wilson-Lee were trawling around Swiss monasteries looking for ancient Greek manuscripts, Colón was interested in print and collected everything he could lay his hands on. Manuscripts, pamphlets, tavern posters all made their way into his library. Over Christmas 1521, he bought 700 books in Nuremberg, and 1,000 more a month later. This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is. Instead of saying knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people, hes doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there, says Wilson-Lee. Its much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information. This is a model of knowledge that says, Were going to take the breadth of print ballads and pornography and newsletters and not exclude that from the world of information.
Writing the book, Wilson-Lee has been charting the sheer breadth of Colóns acquisitions on Twitter. On 9 May 1531, Colón bought a pamphlet on the 1529 Peace of Cambrai; his is the only surviving copy; on 6 May, he acquired Capodilistas 1475 guidebook to the Holy Land; in April he paid 24 pfenins for a 1487 tract on priesthood at Augsburg.
. . . . .
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/11/christopher-columbus-son-worlds-first-search-engine-hernando-colon
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How Christopher Columbus's son (Hernando Colon) built 'the world's first search engine' (Original Post)
niyad
Apr 2019
OP
as a confirmed bibliophile, I am astounded--and saddened by the loss of so many books.
niyad
Apr 2019
#2
This will provide a unique view into the swirl of information that surrounded people, not just
suffragette
Apr 2019
#4
Thank you. Fascinating topic. Looking forward to reading, adding book to my modest library.
RestoreAmerica2020
Apr 2019
#5
Codeine
(25,586 posts)1. Thank you for posting this!
What a great untold story.
niyad
(113,336 posts)2. as a confirmed bibliophile, I am astounded--and saddened by the loss of so many books.
UTUSN
(70,708 posts)3. And no genocide involved!
suffragette
(12,232 posts)4. This will provide a unique view into the swirl of information that surrounded people, not just
exalted works they might read on occasion but the writings that caught their eyes on a daily basis.
Very glad they found this and thank you for posting about it!
RestoreAmerica2020
(3,435 posts)5. Thank you. Fascinating topic. Looking forward to reading, adding book to my modest library.
Paz.
malaise
(269,054 posts)6. Fascinating
Thanks for this
Rec