It is hard to capture fully the excitement of Hernando’s creation. Whereas many libraries of the age—and of the ages directly succeeding this—were little more than boxes for holding the books of their founders, Hernando had engineered a system to draw the knowledge of the world to the banks of the Guadalquivir, to process it into indexes and epitomes that would make it useful, and then to redistribute it, creating a network that could access the immense realm of print. Extraordinary as this was, though, Hernando realized these measures helped only those who already knew which book they were looking for, enabling them to search for a title in the catalogue or a key word in the Book of Materials. Using the library to discover new things, however, was a different matter altogether. This requires an act of browsing, which may seem like the most casual and undirected of acts, but is in truth where the library works most powerfully upon the mind of the reader. It both suggests certain categories and links they have little choice but to accept and puts other things far apart, out of sight and out of mind. In these final years, Hernando and his assistants were busy rearranging his library to conform to the Table of Authors and Sciences, his last catalogue, which provided a subject order that attempted to divide the library into manageable sections.
The underlying architecture of this was simple enough, following the basic divisions of medieval knowledge into the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), and the three professional fields of medicine, theology, and law. But these categories were no longer enough to navigate the world of print—many already contained, as they began to be arranged on the shelves of Hernando’s library, hundreds if not thousands of titles, and the problem would only get worse as the network he had designed began to draw books to the collection. The category of rhetoric, for instance, covered every sort of writing (in verse and prose) that did not belong to other categories, from works of ancient history to bawdy ballads and reports of recent battles. Within these larger categories, then, Hernando began to divide the books, to assemble the things that belonged together in his mind: rows of orations and saints’ lives, a section of sermons and another of Roman history. The logic of these gatherings, which have never before been reassembled, is not always clear: often it is like staring at a tablet in a lost language, beautiful but wholly impenetrable. After following Hernando through his life, however, many sections are instantly recognizable as reflections of his own experiences. The first section of his library is given over to dictionaries, tables, and catalogues; he puts geographical writings with philosophy but also with chess, after spending a lifetime trying to know the world by plotting it on a grid. The library and the librarian cannot help but reflect each other, endlessly forming and being formed in each other’s image.
If the order of the books seems in danger of solipsism, of telling us nothing about the world outside the library but only about the librarian himself, the Table of Authors and Sciences had one last trick to perform. Unlike the other catalogues designed to guide the book hunter through the collection, the Table was not a thick and weighty tome. In fact, it was not a book at all. Rather, the Table consisted of more than ten thousand scraps of paper, each having an “annotation” including Hernando’s book hieroglyphs, which gave access to a vast amount of information about the book at a glance, as well as a wealth of other details, from title and author to subject matter and publication details. What is instantly recognizable to us as a form of card catalogue would have been an inexpressible mystery in a world where decades would pass before this system began to be used elsewhere. We should not let our own experience of card catalogues—of filing cabinets exuding the vanilla odors of decaying paper, long since neglected for the computer terminals nearby—distract us from the wonder and the novelty of this thing. For the promise heralded by this card index—the Table of Authors and Sciences—was essentially one of infinite orders, of a catalogue that could eternally rearrange itself to suit the needs of the searcher, shuffling and sorting to make first one thing and then the next the main principle of order. It was a century and a half before the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, attempting to organize the Royal Library at Hanover, was similarly struck by how “a single truth can usually be put in many different places,” creating a machine he called a note closet that allowed him to rearrange his index cards at will to suit the purpose of his present chain of thought.7
* * *
Yet even as Hernando’s miraculous library reached its greatest moment of triumph, a storm was building on the horizon. Although the first ten thousand books had been ordered, sorted into subject categories and subcategories, the system begins to break down in the numbers above ten thousand. With the rising sea of books, it may have become impossible even to look at each one for long enough to understand what it was about, to know where in the library to put it. Above ten thousand, the books begin for the first time to be divided by language—long runs of books that share nothing more than being written in Italian or in French. While the sections of the library up until that point had blended the languages together, aiming to order all the gathered knowledge of humankind without regard to where it came from, the sheer scale of the task seems to have forced certain compromises on Hernando and his assistants toward the end. Perhaps there was not time to do anything more than simply glance at the title and the first few pages before putting the book with others in the same language. This seems an eminently practical solution, and a choice made in good faith—maybe even something they might have hoped to correct at some time in the future, even though the number of books was likely to continue to expand at an alarming rate. It was, however, a solution that was to have disastrous historical consequences.
The problems of scale were being compounded by the problems of finance. Who on earth was going to pay for this gigantic thing, this enterprise that grew exponentially in size and complexity? Hernando’s letter to the emperor, explaining the form of his library and the marvelous benefits it promised to its enlightened patron, was merely a preamble to a request that the pensions Hernando had been allocated for life be allowed to outlive him, to be granted in perpetuity to the upkeep and expansion of the library. Even if the wealth Hernando could himself claim was sufficient to make a start—and there is reason to doubt it was—it was nevertheless tied up in a complex set of annuities and debts owed to him for various things, many in the New World, assets he had struggled to lay his hands on during his lifetime and that would almost certainly be even more elusive after his death. The fabric of the library was far from complete: outside his window two “blacks” were still employed with their beasts, dredging the waterlogged earth after the massive landscaping Hernando had undertaken, creating a vista of the place where his father’s remains were being prepared for departure. Fifty days before his death, and knowing the end was not far away, Hernando began to draw up a final inventory of all the things around him, right down to the pewter mugs and cups of his household, just as in his days as a page with the Book of Everything at the court of the Infante Juan. A price was put on each of these things, the accumulated detritus of a life, in a document to be appended to his will. The estate was to be made over, in its pieces and its entirety, to his nephew Luis, Diego’s son and heir, along with 15,370 books, over 3,000 printed images, the Casa de Goles, a garden of plants never before seen together, the maps and papers of Columbus, and the most sophisticated piece of information technology ever designed. In return for his life’s work and the legacy of their great progenitor, Hernando asked that the young Columbus scion commit one hundred thousand maravedís a year to the upkeep and expansion of the library—a mere fifteenth of what Hernando had once been promised as his inheritance.8
For all the singularity of Hernando’s purpose in his final days, seeking to ensure his beloved library would be safe after he left it, the will he drew up shows that lives cannot be so easily and neatly tied together. Many things still clearly weighed on his mind as he prepared to die: the Basque mule driver he had mistreated on
his return from England in 1522, a tile maker from Triana in Seville with whom he was in dispute, the relatives of Jean Hammonius, who had joined him in Paris only to die quickly and in strange circumstances. In a break from the silence of the preceding decades, when his father’s name alone was on his lips, Hernando does ask for his mother to be remembered in his funeral prayers. In this light, among the many minor bequests he made, one perhaps stands out more than others: a bequest to one Leonor Martinez, daughter of an innkeeper in Lebrija—a town between Seville and the seaport at Sanlúcar—explaining the payment of three thousand maravedís only by saying it was “for the discharge of his conscience.” These words might mean little if not for the fact that it was the same phrase his brother had used when offering to pay off his mistress Isabel de Gamboa, and that his father had used when leaving a pitiful inheritance to Hernando’s mother, Beatriz Enríquez. Hernando’s compulsion to list every detail may have betrayed him into revealing that, along with his father’s singleness of purpose, he had inherited Columbus’s blindness to all other claims upon his life. But even with his characteristic completeness in this last list, his will, Hernando struggles to sum the pieces of his life, confined as it is to a list of credits and debts. Who knows what may have lingered in his conscience to the end, but have been beyond the scope of this list, like the girls who came aboard the ship in Cariay, naked but for the gold pendants over which his father obsessed, and whose bravery he admired so much.9
But even to the end, the father he had lost (as he noted precisely) thirty-three years before held the place of honor in his mind. The funeral monument he designed for himself, which interrupts the dense writing of his will with a glorious illustration, is a striking symbol of this: it centers on Columbus’s coat of arms, with its picture of islands, and his motto
A Castilla y Léon
Nuevo mundo dió Colón
To Castile and Leon
Columbus gave a New World
Yet the supporters of the shield—which in heraldic terms are the pillars of the dead man’s fame—transformed its meaning. While these would usually be heraldic beasts or symbolic figures representing the virtues of the deceased, Hernando has placed the four principal catalogues of his library as his claim to a place in history equal to his father’s:
The Book of Authors
The Book of Sciences
The Book of Epitomes
The Book of Materials
At eight o’clock in the morning, on 12 July 1539, Hernando called for a bowl of soil to be brought to his bedside and painted his face with the mud of the Guadalquivir, from which his father was being removed on the other bank.
XVII
Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf
The glorious world that Hernando had woven out of the strands of his life began to unravel shortly after he died. Luis Colón, Diego’s son, who was now Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Veragua as well as the third Admiral, showed little interest in the library left him by his uncle; the only further role he would play in Hernando’s story was when, late in life and imprisoned in Oran (North Africa) on charges of bigamy, he may have given (or sold) Hernando’s biography of Columbus to a Genoese merchant, who financed its publication in Venice. After five years of abandonment, in 1544 María de Toledo had the books transferred to the monastery of San Pablo in Seville, where during the following decade Bartolomé de Las Casas used them to write his monumental histories of the New World discoveries and of the brutal genocide inflicted upon its native inhabitants. After a legal challenge by the Cathedral of Seville—Hernando’s second choice to inherit the books—the library was moved there in 1552, where it has remained to this day.
Yet the cathedral proved anything but a sanctuary. Many of the books fell prey to the Inquisition, which identified certain of them as proscribed, including the works of Erasmus, next to whose name, in the volume he gave to Hernando, is written the phrase “auctor damnatus”—a condemned author. In 1592 the Spanish historian Argote de Molina was to lament that the library was now “incarcerated in an attic room off the nave, and used by nobody.” The custodian who at the beginning of the eighteenth century looked after the library along with the candles and wall hangings of the cathedral would record that, when a child, he and his friends used to play among the books, leafing through the illuminated manuscripts to look at the pictures. Though an interest would again begin to be taken in the library at the end of the nineteenth century and (still more so) at the end of the twentieth—around the fourth and fifth centennials of 1492—almost five centuries of neglect, poor storage, and pilfering have reduced the collection from its original glory to a state that, though still infinitely precious, is also a painful reminder of how much has been lost. Of the original fifteen thousand to twenty thousand volumes, fewer than four thousand remain. Some of the rest can be found scattered among the world’s great antiquarian book collections, instantly recognizable by Hernando’s characteristic notes on where he bought the book and how much he paid; many more simply decayed to pulp and dust. Hernando’s collection of images, the greatest of the Renaissance, has disappeared in its entirety, likely destroyed by water damage and simply thrown away. The originals of Columbus’s logs, recording the discovery of the New World, have vanished, leaving historians to rely on transcriptions by Bartolomé de Las Casas and accounts by Hernando. Hernando’s card catalogue to his library, containing the final order of his library and the potential to make his collection infinitely sortable, is likewise lost. The remaining portion of the library continued to be damaged by flooding, with significant disasters in 1955 and again in the 1980s. Although miraculously amid this destruction most of the catalogues survive, providing us with a map of his collection at a level of detail unparalleled for its day, the priceless Book of Epitomes, which summarized thousands of books from the library including many that now exist nowhere in the world, is currently missing and presumed lost, though at least part of it has recently resurfaced.1
Hernando’s dream of a universal library, bringing together every book without distinction of creed or language or subject matter, similarly went with him to the grave. Though others in the age to come also recognized the need to harness the powerful flood of information they saw around them, none had the maniacal ambition Hernando had inherited from his father, and all those who followed in Hernando’s wake set much narrower bounds for their projects. The great Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner, who in addition to making important contributions in botany and zoology attempted to sketch a complete map of knowledge in his Bibliotheca universalis, nevertheless confined himself to learned works in classical languages and satisfied himself with making catalogues without ever attempting to actually gather the books together in one place. Francis Bacon imagined a place of universal knowledge (in his utopian New Atlantis) that may have been modeled on Hernando’s vision for the Casa de Contratación, and though this “House of Salomon” served as a blueprint for London’s Royal Society, it was by then cut off from the idea of collecting books and images on a universal scale. In the mid-sixteenth century several European countries—Spain, France, England—founded (or attempted to found) national libraries, and Philip II’s Escorial library may have taken materials and ideas from Hernando’s creation, including building the oldest surviving bookshelves on Hernando’s model. With a few exceptions, the great library projects in the following centuries did not collect the flimsy pamphlets that captured contemporary events and popular culture, leaving later collectors to scrabble to save what could still be found of these precious things. The national libraries, and the national bibliographies that went along with them, were also increasingly focused on building collections that captured the publications and spirit of the nations that built them, and had no aspirations toward the universal. The solution Hernando had been forced into during his final years, of dealing with the excess of printed information by sorting it into different languages, became widespread, effectively walling the thought of one culture off from another and giving the impression that e
ach had a unique and independent existence. More often than not books from different languages and cultural traditions were simply excluded, as European nations responded to the cornucopian world by turning their backs and stopping their ears. Perhaps unsurprisingly, from the bowels of these libraries antiquarians emerged, in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, to articulate ideas about distinct (and superior) national characters, ideas that were to become increasingly hard-set during the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century and its attendant horrors in the twentieth.2
Similarly, just as the thought and writing of different nations became increasingly separate within the space of the library, so the disciplines into which books were divided became more distant from one another, making it harder and harder for anyone to work in fields as varied and disparate as Hernando did. The later Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment presented many examples of polymaths—Conrad Gesner, Athanasius Kircher, Gottfried Leibniz—but in many ways these men embodied a fantasy of universal knowledge in a world to which the possibility of knowing everything was lost, a world in which labor was increasingly divided and knowledge increasingly specialized. This fantasy, which lingers today, is prompted in part by the alienation brought on by the fragmentation of knowledge, one that asks each mind to be content with knowledge of only a few small pieces in the whole puzzle.
Some of Hernando’s ideas were to be taken up later, by other people in ages better equipped to carry them through to completion. Emperor Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain, was in the 1570s to set in motion a project to survey Spain (the Relaciones Topográficas) that bore a striking resemblance to the Description Hernando had been ordered to halt in 1523. The concept of magnetic variation or magnetic declination, which Hernando may have been the first to record in his arguments for the Badajoz conference and in his biography of his father, were later to be put on a firmer footing by Edmund Halley in the eighteenth century when he produced a map showing the contours of magnetic variation. The eventual solution to the problem of accurately measuring longitude, when it came in the form of John Harrison’s marine chronometer, bore a certain resemblance to what Hernando had imagined in his instrumento fluente in 1524. But Hernando’s grandest ambition—to create a repository of all of the written knowledge of the world, searchable by key word, navigable through short summaries, and sortable by different criteria, all accessible from points widely dispersed in space—represents an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, and databases that was to emerge almost five centuries later. While Hernando’s efforts were astounding and his plans were a marvel of conception, the project he envisioned was in truth not possible without digitization, the ability of machines to read and transcribe texts, and search algorithms that could be run through the Boolean logic of computers. When these technologies did become available, the information behemoth Google was able in the Google Books project to complete in a few short years much of the work that had been stalled for the five centuries since Hernando’s death (even if that revolutionary project was again quickly mired in legal difficulties over copyright and to this day remains half-hidden).
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 32