It was possible to puzzle out some elements of the design by simple logic: the creation of the bookshelves, for instance, had been a matter of necessity. While previous collections, with hundreds or a few thousand volumes, might be stacked on tables or in chests and could be found at will by a librarian of good memory, a library on the scale of Hernando’s would have overwhelmed even the most capacious of human minds and quickly overflowed from most rooms. The new bookshelves took very little space from any room and displaced the weight of the books on to the walls behind them. They formed orderly ranks, so that their call-numbers could be read from left to right, in a sequence like a line of text; storing the books vertically also meant each one could be removed easily, unlike the horizontal stacks where removing the bottom book would make those above topple. But here the logic of the library-explorer may have broken down. What did the line of text, made up of the titles of the books in sequence, actually say? How was the wanderer in the library to navigate their way through this world of books? As anyone who has ambled through a library will know, order is everything. The ways in which books can be organised multiplies rapidly as the collection grows, and each shows the universe in a slightly different light. Order the books alphabetically by author and the wanderer will find all of the Pérezes and the Patels together, whether or not their books share anything else. Ordering by size will save space by fitting books of the same height into snug shelves, but this puts pocket novels in the same place as prayer books.
The wanderer in the library is lost without the order that catalogues and shelving systems create; Hernando referred to such unmapped collections as ‘dead’. But even with a map the wanderer is stuck with the order given to them by the librarian, unable to go through the collection in any other way, especially in a book-hoard flooded as Hernando’s was with the kind of cheap print previously excluded from these civilised spaces. Breaking old paradigms, whether by discovering a new continent or by allowing a new universe of information into the decorous space of the library, was useless or even dangerous unless there was a new paradigm to take its place, a new vision of what these expanded worlds meant. Without this those who had once felt at home in the world would simply be stranded in a pathless sea of information. As a solution, Hernando’s library aimed not simply to be universal but to provide a set of propositions about how that universe fit together. Some of these propositions could be found in the books kept at the centre of the library – colour-coded in leather that was black, red or white, or embossed – which contained his catalogues (including the enchanting and mysteriously named Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books) while others can only be pieced together from the ten thousand pieces of the final map to the collection, with their hieroglyphic signs.
But not everything in the library fitted on to the shelves or could be put in the catalogues. Hernando’s will left strict instructions that as soon as both of his executors were together, they were to open in each other’s presence a chest containing his personal papers. An inventory of these survives, though now worm-eaten and delicate as a form left in ash. Among other things, it lists
designs for a house
ballads for singing
recipes for medicine
a catalogue of plants and gardens
the case of Doña Isabel de Gamboa
the art of making nautical maps
a book of the travels of the emperor
plans for the conquest of Persia and Arabia
a system of charity for the poor
a verse life of Columbus
a poetical treatise
certain geographical writings on Spain
a dictionary
a dialogue between Goodwill, Power and Justice
a ledger of Columbus’ writings
certain papers on the de Arana family
Most of the hundred-odd entries in the inventory are illegible, but the parts that can be deciphered begin to give some sense of the myriad adventures of Hernando’s extraordinary mind. Some of these works by Hernando survive – the immense dictionary he compiled by hand, the geographical encyclopedia he began on a personal tour around the whole of Spain – but many are lost entirely. The list, moreover, is not complete, and omits many of the things in which he played a part, including the maps he helped create, some of which changed the shape of the known world. Some of his works were likely not listed because they were no longer in his possession at the time of his death.4
Among those writings mysteriously missing from this list is perhaps the most famous document of all: the biography of Columbus which was printed, in Italian translation, under Hernando’s name in Venice three decades after his death. To this Life and Deeds of the Admiral we owe much of what we know about the great explorer, including the details of his early life and many of his voyages, especially the fourth voyage, the part of Columbus’ life we know most richly and intimately because Hernando was there as an eyewitness. Though Hernando was not quite eighteen when his father died, he had the kind of intense knowledge of him that no one else could possibly have – not only as his son, but as someone who had lived with him, in a confined space and facing death, for more than a year in a strange land. The fact that the Life was not mentioned among Hernando’s papers, and the curious circumstances surrounding its appearance in Italy long after his death, has led to endless controversies. The original Spanish version of this work has never been found, so we are entirely reliant on the Italian translation. Various theories emerged, many proposing a forgery undertaken in Hernando’s name, a conspiracy to falsify the life of one of history’s greatest figures.
But the missing pieces of this puzzle were waiting to be found in the labyrinthine remnants of Hernando’s library. Somewhat over four thousand titles today form the Biblioteca Colombina, housed in a wing of Seville Cathedral, all silence and spotless marble like a mausoleum. These are only a fraction of the books that made up this once immense library, but this fraction – along with the map of the original collections that survives in the catalogues – is more than enough to reconstruct the life of an extraordinary man in resplendent detail, detail almost unthinkable for most people who lived in his time. This is because Hernando’s books contain within their covers not just an exquisitely detailed map of the Renaissance world, but also a map of his life. In every book he bought, Hernando recorded the date and place of its acquisition and how much it cost, often also noting where and when he read it, if he met with the author, or from whom he received the book if it was a gift. He also responded in many cases to what the books said, though as will become apparent he had his own singular way of doing so. These many fragments, when pieced together, give an account of one of the most fascinating lives in a period filled with entrancing characters; of a man who not only saw more of the world and what it had to offer than almost any of his contemporaries, but also one whose insights into this changing world were astonishingly prescient.5
To reconstruct Hernando’s life from his books is to find him present at many of the most significant events of the age of Renaissance, Reformation and exploration. But Hernando’s view of these events is rather like one of the deceptive, ‘anamorphic’ paintings of which the age was so fond, in which a picture viewed from another angle reveals something entirely different. This is in part because Hernando’s mind moved ceaselessly from event to system, from a single thing to a general framework into which it could be fitted. This will quickly become clear in the story of his life, for while most biographies start with a list of documents about their subject that need to be set in order, many of the documents through which we know about Hernando are themselves lists: catalogues, encyclopedias, inventories, logbooks, which he compiled obsessively and compulsively. We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists, documents which at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list-maker imagines the