Hernando Colón, illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, made it his life’s work to create a complete library of the world's published works in the early 16th century, not long after the printing press was invented. At some 15,000 volumes, the library was accumulated during Colón’s extensive travels. Only a few hundred of those books survive, housed in the Seville Cathedral since 1552.
The recently discovered Libro de los Epítomes manuscript by Colón in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen, Denmark, however, documents the library's extensive collection with more than 2,000 pages of summaries and descriptions.
"The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years," Alison Flood reports in The Guardian.
“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” Dr. Edward Wilson-Lee told The Guardian. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …”
