The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library

“The reason this book is in here is, first and foremost, it’s a brilliant book. Even aside from what it tells us about Columbus, it’s magnificent. He picks a surprising topic that you wouldn’t think would support a whole book, which is the library created by Columbus’s youngest son—the illegitimate Hernando. You’d think: that’s an obscure topic, how’s he going to have the material to support that? But Wilson-Lee is very clever. He goes through the books themselves, talks about the library, and what it tells us about Hernando, and then his father. So, we get to a new way of thinking about Columbus, and a new way of unpacking the mythology about Columbus along the way, although that’s not Wilson-Lee’s primary purpose.” Read more...

The best books on Christopher Columbus

Matthew Restall, Historian