If he had lived 10 or 20 years earlier, Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand might have been able to achieve his dream of collecting every single book in the world. There were too many cities printing too many books,” said Guy Lazure, a historian at the University of Windsor. “It’s great to have it all, but it’s pointless if you can’t find your way around it,” Lazure said. It is called the Libro de los Epitomes, or “book of summaries.”“I didn’t know it was THE missing catalogue,” Lazure said. Collecting all the books in the world was every bit as grandly ambitious as his father’s exploration of the New World.

Source: National Post April 13, 2019 02:13 UTC