Columbus's son tried to read everything

Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, sailed with his father at thirteen. But his great voyage was a different one: trying to gather in a single library everything being printed anywhere in the world.

He crossed Europe buying everything: not just great works but pamphlets, ballads, almanacs and penny sheets nobody else bothered to keep, convinced that knowledge also lived in the cheap stuff. He amassed some 15,000 volumes — staggering for the sixteenth century — and designed catalogues with a summary of every work: a kind of search engine on paper.

One of those catalogues, the Libro de los Epítomes, was considered lost for centuries, until a copy was identified in 2019 in a collection in Copenhagen.

Part of his library still survives in Seville Cathedral. The dream was impossible; the attempt, immortal.