Ancient Library Catalog

Allison Flood writes about the library of 15,000 books cataloged by Hernando Colon, son of Christopher Columbus. The catalog lists books which have vanished since the early 16th century. The catalog was discovered in a Copenhagen library by Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón: The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. The catalog is valuable because it has annotations which summarize the contents of 2,000 volumes, some of which have been lost.

According to Flood:

After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression".
Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics.

-DD