Hernando Colón’s universal library. European culture and intellectual production at the dawn of the global world

While newly printed books were circulating widely around Europe, when more than half a century had passed since Gutenbergs invention, Hernando Coln (1488-1539), second son of Christopher Columbus, undertook the extraordinary challenge of keeping physical track of the proliferation of knowledge.

He not only purchased everything, incessantly, and everywhere, marking on the books place and date of purchase, the local price, and the conversion to Spanish currency; for accessing, managing and reusing his colossal library, he and his invisible technicians also developed a sophisticated cross-indexing and symbols system which is foundational in the history of bibliography and knowledge management.

The Colombina library of Seville still preserves over one third of the almost 16,000 titles which Coln left at his death, as well a dozen manuscript indexes and catalogues that, recording all sorts of information, make it possible to reconstruct the lost portions of the collection, including the volumes famously shipwrecked on their way from Venice to Seville in 1521.

Financing, gathering, cataloguing and managing a library of such scale required widespread connections, the support of an international network, and a vision deeply intertwined with the politics of knowledge acquisition of the new-born Spanish Empire.

COLIBRI aims at opening the doors and explore the legacy of the most important library of the early modern period, completing the reconstruction of its content in order to investigate it; understanding how it worked as the first large-scale information processing system of modern times, and as a place for the production, not only for the storage and preservation, of knowledge; exploring the still new relationship between written and print culture and the early European and intercontinental book market; finally, showing how the movement and the stories of Colons books reflect the developments of Western culture of the last five centuries.