Capitana Book

MotorBoating

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.

Books of the Brave

Since its original appearance in 1949, Irving A. Leonard's pioneering Books of the Brave has endured as the classic account of the introduction of literary culture to the Spanish New World. Leonard's study documents the works of fiction that accompanied and followed the conquistadores to the Americas and argues that popular texts influenced these men and shaped the way they thought and wrote about their experiences. UC Press's 1992 edition combines Leonard's text with a selection of the documents that were his most valuable sources—nine lists of books destined for the Indies. Containing a wealth of information, these lists provide the documentary evidence for what is perhaps Leonard's greatest contribution: his demonstration that royal and inquisitorial prohibitions failed to control the circulation of books and ideas in colonial Spanish America. Rolena Adorno's introduction reaffirms the lasting value of Books of the Brave and chronicles developments in cultural-historical studies that have shed light on the role of books in Spanish American colonial culture. Adorno situates Leonard's work at the threshold between older, triumphalist views of Spanish conquest history and more recent perspectives engendered by studies of native American peoples. With its rich descriptions of the book trade in both Spain and America, Books of the Brave has much to offer historians as well as literary critics. Indeed, it is a highly readable and engaging book for anyone interested in the cultural life of the New World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.