Finding the Lost Library: Hernando Colón's Dispersed Books Worldwide

The overarching aim of the FILOL project is to track down for the first time the dispersed books from Hernando Colns Universal Library.

In the early 16th century, Hernando Coln (1488-1539) established in Seville the first documentation centre in the Western world, in which he aimed to gather copies of every book on every subject in every language. Almost the entirety of his collection was comprised of printed books.

Unlike other Renaissance intellectuals, Coln collected not only fine editions but also the products of popular publishing, such as pamphlets, almanacs and other ephemera.

Colns library was, therefore, the first official repository of the written products of what was considered universal culture, destined in most cases to disappear precisely because of their physical fragility.

To manage the 15,000 books he collected, Coln designed a revolutionary system of cross-referenced catalogues relating to the authors, subjects, extracts and summaries of his volumes.

After Colns death, most of his books were dispersed, and today only about 4,000 volumes from his original collection survive in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville.

In addition to extensive losses immediately following Colns death, books continued to go missing from the BC into the late 19th century, frequently winding up on the antiquarian book market.

The FILOL project will attempt to describe and locate a significant portion of the Universal Librarys dispersed volumes, making them available in a catalogue hosted in the open-access database Book of Books, developed by the team of the UCPH project Hernando Colns Book of Books.

This will be accomplished through a cross-reference examination of the complete set of Colns library catalogues and an innovative research methodology focused on the analysis of the antiquarian book markets bibliographic tools to track the mobility of early printed books in the modern and contemporary age.