'Libro De Los Epítomes,' A 500-Year-Old Library Catalog, Surfaces Anew In the 16th century, Hernando Colón assembled one of the greatest print-media collections the world had ever known. For centuries, its reference book was missing — until it turned up in Denmark.

Christopher Columbus' Son Had An Enormous Library. Its Catalog Was Just Found

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

This next story sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster. It involves the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of a precious book that was lost for centuries. Edward Wilson-Lee is here to explain. He is a Cambridge professor who wrote a biography of the man at the center of this story. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

EDWARD WILSON-LEE: Thank you for having me on the show.

SHAPIRO: All right, to begin, who was Hernando Colon?

WILSON-LEE: Hernando was the second illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. He was born from an affair that Columbus had when he was kicking around the Spanish courts. But because the voyage in 1492 was successful, Hernando grew up with a fair amount of power and privilege. But because he was an illegitimate son, he never quite gained the levels of prominence that his father did.

But he always wanted to prove himself his father's son in spirit. And so he undertook this bizarre, extraordinary project to build a universal library that would have every book in the world in it. And he very much saw this as a counterpart to his father's desire to circumnavigate the world. So Hernando was going to build a universal library that would circumnavigate the world of knowledge.

SHAPIRO: OK. So 500 years ago, Hernando Colon assembles one of the greatest libraries the world has ever known. Most of these books are lost to history. Now tell us about what was just discovered centuries later.

WILSON-LEE: One of the things that Hernando realized was that collecting every book in the world - and this was during the early age of print when the number of books was accelerating rapidly - collecting all these books wouldn't really be very useful if you didn't have some way to organize and distill them all. So he paid an army of readers to essentially read every book in the library and to distill it down to a short summary so that this enormous library could be at the disposal of a single person.

And this book, the "Libro De Los Epitomes," which contained the summary of the books in the library, is mentioned in an account of the library by his last librarian. And then it goes missing shortly after Hernando's death in 1539 and isn't really heard of for almost 500 years until about three weeks ago. It turned up in a library in Copenhagen.

SHAPIRO: This single volume summarizing thousands of books that were in Hernando Colon's collection just pops up in a Copenhagen library.

WILSON-LEE: This is really a story of, you know, a book that was lost in the library almost because it was put on the wrong shelf. The person who collected this in Denmark, Arni Magnusson, appears to have bought Hernando's manuscript as part of a group of manuscripts. So it sat in this collection for 300-odd years, and no one really knew what it was until Hernando's story started to become slightly more widely known and they realized what they were holding.

SHAPIRO: So what does this volume, this "Libro De Los Epitomes," look like?

WILSON-LEE: Oh, it's an absolutely gorgeous thing, you know, about the size of a coffee table book. It's almost a foot-thick. It's 2,000 pages-long in beautifully, beautifully clear handwriting. And the exciting thing about this is that many of the books that it summarizes will be books that are lost in every other form.

Hernando was in many ways a kind of crazed visionary like his father. Whilst most other book collectors of the day were collecting Plato and Cicero, Hernando was one of the few people to see the real potential of print. And so he was going around collecting all of the kind of throwaway things that really was changing the world - so early newspapers and weather reports and things like that. So this "Libro De Los Epitomes" will capture the world of early printing in ways that are - you know, are often lost.

SHAPIRO: You had already written an entire book about this ancient library. Can you describe for us the moment you learned that this volume which was central to the whole project had been rediscovered?

WILSON-LEE: I was actually sitting on a beach, and I got an email about it. And I just about dropped the phone in the ocean. And...

SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Did you believe it was real, or did you think this has to be a hoax?

WILSON-LEE: I didn't want to let myself believe it was real until I actually got to Copenhagen. And there was really no doubt. It has his hand all over it, and it's confirmable in any number of ways.

SHAPIRO: What happens now?

WILSON-LEE: So there's a project underway to digitize the manuscripts and to transcribe it. It'll be translated for everyone whose 16th century Latin isn't that sharp.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter).

WILSON-LEE: And it'll be made available to the public. So you know, there'll be a chance for everyone. I mean, it'll probably take five or seven years to actually get all of that done. You know, there's a lot of work to be done in identifying which books are in there and which ones are lost in every other form.

SHAPIRO: Edward Wilson-Lee is the author of "The Catalogue Of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, And The Quest To Build The World's Greatest Library." He joined us on Skype. Thank you so much.

WILSON-LEE: Thank you, Ari.

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