Book Of Lost Books

A couple of years ago I read The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a marvelous four volume fictional series by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  The Shadow of the Wind, the first novel in the series, had been recommended to me.  Set in Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century, it proved a fascinating mixture of history and vivid characters with surrealistic Gothic romance overtones, dealing with the Spanish Civil War and Franco's regime.  I went on to read the other three volumes, which take the story both forward and backward in time - 2,500 pages in toto.

I was reminded of the Zafon novels upon coming across an article about the recent discovery Libro de los Epitomes, a cross-referenced index to a library of 15-20,000 volumes assembled by Hernando Colon, the illegitimate (but recognized) son of Christopher Columbus, in the 16th century.

The significance of the index is that Colon's ambition was not just to collect well-known books, but every book that had been published or, as he wrote, "all books, in all languages and on all subjects, that can be found both within Christendom and without".  Colon's collection included almanacs and news pamphlets, as well as books.  Though only 4,000 volumes of his collection survive in the Biblioteca de Seville, the book summaries in the index, written by readers paid by Colon, who then edited their summaries, provide information on many books that have completely disappeared over the past 500 years.

The Libros was recently discovered in the collection of the Arnamagnaen Institute at the University of Copenhagen.  The Institute primarily houses works in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages with only 22 volumes in Spanish or by Spanish authors.  Somehow, the 2,000 page, volume had remained unrecognized.  The collection in which it resides had been donated to the University by the Icelandic scholar Arni Magnusson in 1730.  How Magnusson obtained the Libro de los Epitomes remains unknown.  Plans are underway to digitize the volume and make it widely available.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, a biography of Hernando Colon by Edward Wilson-Lee, was recently published.  I'll be reading it.

Now, if we can just find the books that were housed in the Library of Alexandria!