Edward Wilson-Lee’s marvellous THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS has won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2019. The prize celebrates the best non-fiction books with specifically historical content and of high literary merit – that is, not primarily written for the academic market.
THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS was published by William Collins in the UK in 2018 and by Scribner in the US in 2019. Rights have been sold in eight translation markets so far: Bulgaria (Colibri), China (Guangxi Normal University Press), France (Editions Paulsen), Germany (Btb Verlag), Italy (Bollati Boringhieri), Japan (Kashiwashobo), Saudi Arabia (Madarek) and Spain (Ariel, Planeta). THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography in 2019.
Without libraries, who are we? We have no past, and no future… THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS tells for the first time in English the story of the first great universal library in the age of printing — and of Hernando Colon, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, who created it. Hernando spent his life trying to build the first universal library of print: personally scouring bookshops in an attempt to acquire a copy of every book, he brought them back to his library in Seville, where he drove himself mad attempting to devise how best to navigate and organise the world of print.
Hernando lived in extraordinary times. He knew Erasmus, Dürer and Thomas More, was at the forefront in the first international conference to determine the circumference of the world, led the team that created the first world map on scientific principles — and invented the modern bookcase. Hernando’s life placed him at the centre of the ages of exploration, print, and the Reformation: he spent a year living with his father marooned aboard a shipwrecked hull off Jamaica and wrote the first biography of Columbus. To reconstruct his life is not only to recover a vision of the Renaissance world, but also to appreciate the passions and intrigues that lie beneath our own disciplined attempts to bring order to the world. THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS is an unforgettable journey through these layered realities — and a bibliophile’s dream!
Praise for Edward Wilson-Lee and THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS
‘Perfectly pitched poetic drama — the closest thing documented history can get to magic realism…THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS is a wonderful book, not least in the literal sense of an epic unfolding in a nonstop procession of marvels, ordeals and apparitions… A simile-studded prose that is seldom less than elegant and often quite beautiful… THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS is most compelling as a meditation on the response to an explosive expansion of knowledge.’ — Simon Schama, Financial Times
'Wilson-Lee’s main subject… is an intellectual hunger at once dazzling and monstrous: Hernando Colon’s insatiable urge to know and to possess… For lovers of history, Wilson-Lee offers a thrill on almost every page… THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS is an intellectual biography, but its beating heart is the tangled love of a son for his father... Edward Wilson-Lee’s magnificent book helps us understand [Hernando’s] obsessive desire to gather and preserve, even in the face of chaos.' — Irina Dumitrescu, New York Times
'Superb biography... THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS affords an intriguing glimpse into the Renaissance mind and its rage for order, as well as a beguiling preview of the modern library and, very possibly, what lies beyond.' — Ernest Hilbert, Wall Street Journal
‘An elegantly written, absorbing portrait of a visionary man and his age.’ — Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)
'A gripping study of heroic endeavour and family rivalry; it's a tour de force of sifting through dusty fragments and of vivid biographical storytelling, as well as a delicious, Borgesian dream for all bookworms and lovers of libraries and print ephemera.' — Marina Warner, New Statesman
‘Edward Wilson-Lee’s THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS is an utter joy, the story of the first internationally important library and the man whose vision it was. It will remind everyone who reads of it of how wonderful libraries and the people who work in them are.’ – Joseph O’Connor, Irish Times
About the Author
Raised in Kenya, in a family of wildlife conservationists and filmmakers, Edward Wilson-Lee went to school in Switzerland, then to university in London, New York, Oxford and Cambridge, with periods living in New Orleans and Mexico in between. He now teaches medieval and Renaissance literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he has won prestigious research grants. His wife is an American scholar and writer, and they visit the US regularly. He is writing his next book for William Collins.
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