Chris Freeland: [00:00:00] Shipwreck, mutiny, disaster. These are not the kinds of themes you typically associate with a library, but for one young collector in the 16th century, the drive to build the greatest library of his time is a swashbuckling story for the ages. Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive.

In The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the story of Hernando Colón who sailed with his father, that's Christopher Columbus, on his final voyage to the New World. After Columbus died in 1506. Hernando, who is only 18 years old at the time, sought to one up his father by building a library of everything ever printed.

So what happened to [00:01:00] Hernando's library? Well, that's what we're gonna dive into today and here to kick things off is Dave Hansen, the Executive Director of Authors Alliance. 

Dave Hansen: Thanks, Chris. Today we have author Edward Wilson-Lee with us to tell us about Hernando Colón's life and passions. Edward Wilson-Lee is a fellow in English at Sydney Sussex College Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. Joining the discussion with Edward will be Brewster Kahle, who you all know well, the founder and digital librarian of the internet archive.

So first let's hear from Brewster about why this book has really resonated with him.

Brewster Kahle: I love this book. Okay. It's a page turner. It's actually a really good read, but for me it is incredibly important. I'm trying to understand what's the future of, well, the internet.

The Internet Archive, libraries. At this time, I think we're all trying to understand why are we going through a political turmoil that seems to be built [00:02:00] on Facebook, Twitter, sort of a change in media type. So I've been looking for. An understanding and trying to help predict the future, near term future for our new digital age and.

For those of us that are trying to build libraries and depend on them, whether it's Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Google Books, or what's going on here, where can we draw analogies from Then I've discovered of this Hernando, Columbus, and yes, there's the whole colonial issues that are going through, so you have to sort of take him within his own context.

But he's a fabulous figure. So I wrote a a paper about trying to figure out what can we learn from Hernando Columbus' Library? Why is it completely forgotten at this stage, and what could we learn by rebuilding it?

Dave Hansen: Thanks, Brewster. Now let's welcome Edward [00:03:00] to the discussion to tell us about his book, the Catalog of Shipwrecked Books.

Edward Wilson-Lee: Thank you very much, So I'm gonna start the talk by telling an anecdote about Hernando Colón, who's the subject of the talk. And this particular anecdote takes place on the 29th of February, 1504.

And at this point on the 29th of February, 1504, uh, Hernando Colan, who was about 15 years old at the time, had been living on a shipwreck off the north of Jamaica for nine months. And the other resident of the poop deck of the shipwreck was his father, Christopher Columbus. When I started to give this talks about this four or five years ago, I, I used to make a joke about.

The prospect of being locked up with your near relatives for nine months at a time being unimaginable and unbearable, but obviously we've all had much more experience of that since then. So Hernando had been living on, on this shipwreck off the north of Jamaica with Christopher Columbus, his father. Hernando was Christopher's bastard son.

Although the, the [00:04:00] Spanish have a much more gentle term for it, I a natural son. And Fernando had set off with his father on what was Columbus's fourth and turned out to be his final voyage across the Atlantic in 1502. They stopped very briefly in Espanola to visit, uh, Santo Domingo, the town that was named after the boy's grandfather.

But they carried swiftly on, in part because Columbus wasn't allowed to land on the island, which he had landed on in 1492, and which had swiftly descended into chaos in his wake, but also because. Columbus was much more interested in achieving the goal, which had always been his key idea, which was to find a passage through the inconveniently located content of the Americas so that he could complete a circumnavigation of the world.

Which he believed would bring into being the last things, the coming of the second reign of Christ, the [00:05:00] thousand year reign of Christ and the end of the world. So Fernando and his father had spent 14 months coasting along, what is modern day Panama, looking for the elusive straight through the Americas so that they could continue this, navigation.

Along a series of, of disasters and frustrations. Uh, Columbus had seen the writing on the wall, and realized they'd already lost two of the four ships, which, with which they'd set out. and the two that remained were so filled with wormholes, Hernandez's. Lovely phrase for this is, were riddled with wormhole so much.

They looked like honeycomb. They were so filled with wormholes that. All of the men on the ships were having to work pumps 24 hours a day to get the water outta the ships and to keep them afloat. So they started back towards the Spanish Center ofop operations in Espanola. But they realized they weren't gonna make it.

So they decided to run the, the ships of ground north of Jamaica and to send off parties to try and raise [00:06:00] the alarm and gain help from Hispaniola. So by this time, uh, 29th of February, 1504, they'd been living there for nine months. They'd heard nothing back from the parties. They'd, the rescue parties they'd sent off.

And things were starting to run rather fin, they were running out of food and while they had initially been able to trade with the Tino Elders of Northern Jamaica for food, the kind of trinkets that they had with them to trade were, were rapidly flooding the local market and were not in very much interest to them.

Luckily for Hernando, his father had with him two magic books on this voyage. They may have had more books than this on the voyage, but they had two that we know about for certain. One of these was called the Libro de Las Prophecies, the Book of Prophecies, and this was a book in which Hernando and his father and and a monk called Gaspar had compiled passages from the Bible, from classical literature, from medieval mystical writings, which they believed [00:07:00] predicted.

Columbus's voyages and the eventual success of his circumnavigation of the world and, and the things that it would bring about. But that wasn't the book that saved them that day. The book that saved them in that day instead was the second book that we know about. And it was just a thin, flimsy pamphlet called The Almanac Perpetuum, or FIEs by, uh, an early modern Spanish Jew called Abraham, or Portuguese, I should said, who had.

Taken the calculations in order to work out the times of eclipses. The book that saved them that day was the Almanach Perpetuum, which laid out the times of eclipses, and there was an eclipse predicted for this very day, the 29th of February, 1504. But what they had at their disposal was this, this almanac, which pro predicted the time of.

Eclipses, but there were several problems with [00:08:00] this. So it, it predicted the time of eclipses in Salamanca in Spain, and no one, obviously this was as, as those history buffs among you will know, and no one had come up with an accurate measure of longitude by this point. So actually they knew had no, uh, ability to translate the time of the eclipse in Spain to the time of the eclipse in Northern Jamaica, but.

Columbus who was ever a kind of pt Barnum showman, decided that he would use this magic book to run his chances one more time. So he summoned the Tino Elders of Northern Jamaica to his ship, and he told them that his God was a jealous God who was angry at them for not supplying the Spaniards with food.

And that in earnest of his God's anger that evening, he would swallow the moon and. Uh, the Tino elders presumably chuckled at this and returned to the shore, and, um, then they sat [00:09:00] around to wait. And the wait must have been absolutely unbearable. Not only because they didn't know exactly what time the eclipse would happen in Jamaica, and obviously if the eclipse happened before sunset, the effect would be rather lost.

Also because being the 29th of February leap days, I dunno about for you guys, but for me, always have a slightly uncanny feel of time being out of joint. But also because we have to remember that by this time they'd been away from other European for almost two years during bouts of malaria and storms and fevers and so on and so forth.

So they probably couldn't be all that sure that it was actually the 29th of February. But Columbus's luck. Held out. And Hernando writes in his biography of his father, which is the main source that we have for almost, for much of what we know about Columbus, that on the evening of the 29th of February, as the sun set, the earth's penumbra did swallow the moon.

As Columbus predicted, [00:10:00] the, a howl of dismay went up from the island. And the Tino from that point on, were happy to supply the Spaniards, uh, with, uh, with food. The other thing to to note about this incident is that while. Columbus was unable at this point to make an accurate measure of longitude and to, uh, know what time the eclipse would happen in Jamaica.

The reverse calculation was actually quite simple, so once you knew what time the eclipse happened in Jamaica, you could make a calculation of the longitudinal distance between Spain and Jamaica and in the prophecies, this crazy compendium of medieval and and biblical predictions. Columbus recorded what was then the most accurate measurement of latitude of the the Caribbean of the time.

So the reason why I like to tell this anecdote is because I think it helps you to, I helps to immerse people in this strange transitional world in which Hernando lived [00:11:00] right, in which his father was this kind of millennial, apocalyptic figure who believed in him himself as a visionary and in his place in history.

But also was reliant on, in order to produce this kind of magic that he did on these new things, these printed pamphlets, which circulated knowledge, these calculations, these geographical calculations. And he in turn was pushing forward what we would think of today as scientific knowledge, the cutting edge of science.

But this was all in service of a sort of. Crazed, millennial apocalyptic vision. So, you know, we like, I think in some ways to think of the, the, the narrative of history as moving from. Superstition and mysticism to hard, rigorous science and rational thought. But actually the crossover period was very, very long.

Perhaps to some degree has not yet ended. And you know, these two things are often [00:12:00] more closely allied that we, we like to, um. We like to admit. So yes, Fernando lived in this world of both technology and lingering beliefs, which would be very alien to us. So technology, which would be much, much newer to us.

And he was to, to go on from this moment to live an extraordinary life, which I'm only gonna be able to talk on, touch on very briefly here. Culminating in his, his grand ambition to build the greatest library that the world had ever known, which in his own words, would contain a copy of every book in every language, on every subject from within Christendom and without.

At his death, the library had 15,321 books, rather modest compared to some of the libraries we are gonna be discussing later, but exponentially larger than most libraries of the day. But Hernando. Didn't just stop there. He also had the largest collection of printed images of the day. 3,204 images he had, uh, started a geographical encyclopedia of Spain.

He [00:13:00] started a dictionary of the Latin language. He only got to the letter B, but before you laugh at him, by the time he got to the letter B, he had reached 1,426 very densely set huge manuscript pages with 3000 definitions in them. He stops. I always think amusingly at the word bebo I drink, so you can kind of think maybe what was on his mind at the time.

He started what is likely to have been the first botanical garden in Europe, which is supposed to have had 5,000 trees in it at its height. And, but kind of most importantly for our purposes here today, he recognized that this exponential growth of information to which. He had access was not only worthless, but potentially dangerous if you didn't find a way to to navigate it.

Right. And so the smallest number here is actually the most important one. 14 different cataloging systems, which he wrestled [00:14:00] to try and think of ways of making this vast amount of information, this vast amount of number of, or printed books and images and other bits of information, something that could be used.

And he was the kind of the man called forth by history for this task. He had a. Preternatural, almost obsessive need to catalog things around him. So this is a, a lovely document from 1509 when Hernando was just 21, his second trip to the New World, when he left a list of everything that was in his room, in his spani.

Write down to pieces of string and some of the first oil paintings, European oil paintings in the new world, and the first ecological collection or collection of European style books in the new world. So 234 books in four different archives or, or chests representing in some senses the first library in the Americas.

And he was to go onto this, you know, doing a vast number of, of different [00:15:00] cataloging systems to try and. Wrestle with this information. It's why it's a story for our age in some ways, in that what he was trying to do was to think of ways to make this information useful. It involved among other things, the generation of a, a hieroglyphic language to describe his book Glyphs, which would tell you at a glance of vast amount of information about the books, you know, what they were, what language they were printed in, what size they were, how many pages they were, whether they were in prose or verse, whether they were translated, and so on, so forth.

It's a version of the kind of perfect language that people were obsessed with at the time. So it's quite similar to the language that Thomas Moore generated for his utopian people who were supposed to be the kind of perfect people. Uh, but this is again, a, a kind of reflection of the anxiety that they were going to be overwhelmed by all these new things and the need to find the correct languages and the correct ordering systems in order to make these things manageable.

[00:16:00] So. His catalogs went from lists in order of acquisition and, and alphabetical lists, right through attempts to order things by subject matter and the, the grand, um, you know, final kind of piece of the, the project and the cataloging systems, which was the, the li of the Los Peter, me. So this was a project not just to collect and organize.

All of the books in the world, but actually to employ a team of sumas, of summary writers who would read every book in the world and produce a short summary of what it was about. Again, I, I think probably barista and I will touch on that a little bit in our conversation, but that's just to give you a sense of the scope and the scale of Hernando's life.

There's so much I haven't even begun to touch on, but I wanna bring Brewster in now and yeah, turn this into a bit more of a conversation so it's not just me going on. 

Brewster Kahle: Thank you very much and yes, I'm sure we're now understanding just how important this particular person is and I would like to see if we can go through in our conversation sort of about the [00:17:00] times about this person and the, the library, what happened to the library, and then what we can do now to think about our libraries.

Using the lessons we can learn from what happened, what didn't happen, why don't we know of it? So the times, so I've heard that you know, you are a 16th century scholar. I've heard that the. Pamphlets and the printed word of these prints were very important towards stirring people up. That the SMUs in your book, you say there were 248 of SMUs books in Hernando's collection.

I mean, I. Holy crow, who puts out that much? So it must be more like pamphlets or blog posts that are coming out from, Erasmus and the line that, uh, what Erasmus set, um, laid the fire, but Luther let the flame and that basically institutions were turned over. Uh, governments were, were [00:18:00] ransacked. I mean, just people were just burned.

What, when there's a technology change in. And medium, what happens and what at least happened during the 16th century and what can be attributed to that, to, you know, all the other things that are going on in this early 16th century. 

Edward Wilson-Lee: Yeah, I say, I mean it's, it's an utterly fascinating period, you know, the late 15th, early 16th century, and there are these utterly seismic things that, to European culture at the time, you know?

Rediscovery or at least a new kind of energy in, in looking at classical learning, there's these in increased encounters, global encounters. So Europe's horizons suddenly explode and, and suddenly, you know, there are annual voyages all around the world. There is the introduction of the printing press and you know, there is the, the reformation that the schism of the church and the.

vast changes about how people think about the relationship between God and man, time and eternity, you know, [00:19:00] the present time and you know, broader timescales and so on, so forth. And I think in the past, historians were always quite resistant to thinking of the central driver here being the introduction of the printing press, right?

So there's this kind of way of describing it called technological determinism. The idea that you introduce a technology and suddenly everything changes, right? And I think that is a. You know, it would be too simplistic to say that that's the only determining factor, but I think that is something that those of us who have lived through the last 25, 30 years have no trouble in believing that the introduction of an information technology can utterly revolutionize the world.

Right? So those of us who've lived as I have. From an age of, uh, I grew up in Kenya, so I grew up in a, uh, an even more technologically rudimentary environment, handwritten letters and so on and so forth. You know, up until an age where I'm speaking to you all scattered across the world on a free video call, but it, and it's utterly none of us would, I think, contest the fact that it's utterly revolutionized, how we live on a day-to-day basis, how we work, how we.[00:20:00] 

Communicate with our loved ones, how we've, you know, our political systems, our economic systems, everything has been completely changed in a very short period of time by an increase in connectivity. So I think this is a, you know, this is a generation that's entirely open to. Understanding the centrality of print and what it did to that world.

And I think you're absolutely right, but, you know, Erasmus, uh, he would shudder to hear me make this comparison, but Erasmus was the sort of influencer of the day, right? He was the person who really understood the, you know, the potential of. Print to spread a message very quickly. And he was, immensely kind of influential and powerful.

And, you know, luckily in, in some ways he was actually a very kind of wise and, and, and very tolerant. And they were those who would come after him who wanted to use the capacities of connectivity to start fires and to, you know, to rabble rous. And again, that's something that I suppose most of us could probably recognize from our, our [00:21:00] current day.

Hernando also was. Utterly extraordinary in this way. As I mentioned, he was his father's illegitimate son. He very much felt he had something to prove. He needed to demon, to do something to demonstrate that he was truly Columbus' son was heir to his legacy. And whereas Columbus's aim had always been universal navigation, circumnavigating the world.

Which he believed would have these apocalyptic effects. You know, and Andrew's equivalent of this was, was kind of circumnavigating the world of information to have a complete collection of everything in the world. And again, didn't. When I started talking about this, just how revolutionary this was at the time.

So there were, it was an age of great book collectors, right. But they were all interested in collecting lost manuscripts of authoritative classical tomes. So your Cicero, your slut, your Livy, you know, and scouring Swiss mon uh, monasteries to try and find these lost text. Right? Hernando was pretty much unique at the time in seeing that it was cheap print.[00:22:00] 

That was going to revolutionize the world. And he was really the only person who decided to start collecting this cheap print. So things like, you know, early newsletters, ballads, almanacs, uh, you know, all of these things which we now understand to have made up maybe 60% or more of what was printed at the time, but which everyone else thought of as ephemera.

Uninteresting, right? Fernando, again, has this sort of slightly strange revolutionary sense of his own place in history that if I can collect all these things and find a way to harness that information, to make that information navigable right then that is going to be a tool of of immense power. And in a sense, this is a version of the inductive method that instead of taking some principles and deducing everything from the world about them, what you do is you take everything and you boil up from there.

Right? [00:23:00] So this is the big data challenge of its day and, and attempt to take everything and, and, and boil upwards from there. So he's, he's kind of a, a slightly, you know, an extraordinary figure in that regard. 

Brewster Kahle: You're going into the sort of the unusualness of the man and the times I obviously, you know, I'm speaking as founder of the internet archive, where we've been accused of just going and collecting well blog posts and social media and who would possibly want all of that.

And we said it's going to be important, but the big institutions we're not collecting it. In fact, he was also really an outsider. You know, there's this kind of cool portrait that you, you, uh, reproduce. I think it's the only portrait of what this guy looked like. He kinda looks pretty friendly and he got a lot done through this.

But he built this library and he also didn't just build a library for his own use. He seemed to go and want it to be publicly accessible. And this, I understand from other readings was very unusual. [00:24:00] So what was he wanting out of this unprecedented collection? 

Edward Wilson-Lee: Yeah, so I mean, you're absolutely right that he was an outsider.

I think part of it, what he wanted was to, to achieve something great and monumental and historic. And in a way like his father, the proof of his visionary nature was that no one understood what he was doing. Right? So just like, you know, the old Irving Berlin song, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he thought the world was round.

The idea, it's not genius unless it's. A step change. It's something that people don't understand. Right. And Fernando, I think had that sense. There's a lovely anecdote if I can say this. I dunno if we're beyond the watershed, but I'll try and keep it. The library, the physical library, which he started building in 1526 to to house the books.

He built it on a Moar, which is basically a dung heap, right? He bought a bunch of land that was spe. There was a dung heap outside of Seville, outside of the city walls, and he built it there, and he had a plaque made for the library, which said, I have built my library upon the. SH one T that other people have thrown out [00:25:00] thinking it's worthless.

So again, you get the sense of this how proud he is, that he's making something out of something that people don't find worthwhile. So the public access, on the one hand, they lived in an era of utter kind of terror about the loss of culture, right? So this is the flip side to the recovery of classical culture was the awareness of quite how much of Latin and Greek culture had simply disappeared, right?

And they were determined that the same thing would not happen. To them. And so in some ways this was a kind of doomsday vault for culture, right? And something that, to try and make sure it wasn't all wiped out again. But yeah, so what Hernando essentially envisioned, which was a, which was gonna be an extraordinary thing, was that the catalogs of the library would be printed and distributed across.

At least across Spain, perhaps across, you know, the world. There's no way to kind of limit their distribution in a way so that everyone, you know, again, kind of like the internet, where you have remote access to a, a, a, a central [00:26:00] database of information, right? That he wanted everyone to be able to see what was in the library and.

If you couldn't find, you know, kind of like many of the research libraries nowadays, their rules, if you couldn't find what you needed elsewhere, then you could come to the library and access it. Although he was slightly kind of paranoid about it and he, he designed the. Systems for protecting the library, which involved basically readers being inside shark cages so that they couldn't take the books out and hide them in their gowns and things like that.

He definitely, I mean, he was definitely more public minded in some ways, although that was balanced with a kind of deep fear of dispersal and destruction. 

Brewster Kahle: What did happen to his library over the next, you know, so there wasn't anything like the boley in it. Oxford didn't get going for another a hundred years.

I mean, what happened to his library in particular over a period of time? And then, uh, I'll ask another question about sort of the modern sort of what, how did, how'd this resurface and what can we learn? But what happened? Okay, [00:27:00] so there's this great library. Unprecedented, bigger than maybe since Alexandria.

I'm probably bigger by character count than Alexandria just because what? What happened? 

Edward Wilson-Lee: Yeah. So the flip side to no one understanding what you're doing is that no one understands what you're doing. So when he died, he, he spent the last years of his life desperately trying to get the Spanish monarchy to, you know, subsidize this thing in, uh, in perpetuity and so on, so forth.

And he only kind of moderately succeeded. So the library when he died, was passed to his nephew who came in the legitimate line. Who was the inheritors of the, the kind of the titles and the fortunes of the Columbus' varied as they were, and the nephew was a wasteful, as the legitimate heirs often were in the period.

He's famous for very little more than being arrested for bigamy and being the reason why Hernando biography of his father survives because he sold it when he was broke to a Venetian bookseller. So we'd know very much less about Columbus and about [00:28:00] Hernando if he had not done that. But he was a waste draw.

He had no interest in the books. The books were locked up in, in one monastery for a period of about 15 years, and then eventually ended up in the Civil Cathedral where they were locked away in a kind of attic room because again, no one. Understood what this collection was for or what it, how it was supposed to work.

So they kind of molded in, in an attic room. Some of them were censored and, and taken away by the Inquisition who were not very hacked with, uh, some of the materials that he'd been collecting, given that the collection was supposed to be universal, but largely, this is a question, you know, a lot of it is a question of neglect.

Right. So just, you know, we think of barbarians. We think of destruction coming by pitchfork, bearing barbarians, but really often in history, destruction simply comes by neglect. People just aren't interested there. There's something newer and shinier over there, and they forget. And so over the course of the years between.

Pilfering and water damage and the inquisition, [00:29:00] the number of books dwindled. So of the original 15 to 20,000 books, about 4,000 books still survive today in the Seville Cathedral and are available to to researchers, but. Many of Hernandez's books are distributed across the great libraries of the the world.

We're starting to find them again to to relocate them wonderfully. You know, he took notes in everything that he wrote, said. There's a very distinctive marking any rare book collectors that might be on the Zoom call. If it says, you know, Hernandez's books have a characteristic marking Es, this book cost me.

'cause he noted the date on which he bought the book where he bought. How much he paid for it, which again, for people like me in, you know, fans of the early modern book is an unbelievable resource. It allows you to walk into a 16th century bookstore and see what was on the shelves, because he bought one of everything and he told you how much it cost, right?

So it's this extraordinary resource, but for understanding what the early world of print is like, most of this [00:30:00] information is lost. 4,000 of the books still survive more are, are, are found elsewhere. And, and we're still finding bits and pieces of the collection, like this extraordinary copy of the, which, you know, was found in 2019 after going missing for, for almost 450 years.

So that's, you know, it's lost in some senses, but perhaps, you know, slowly, slowly coming back together. In others, 

Brewster Kahle: there's a wonderful three volume set of trying to reconstruct his print collection. Which I, I, it was, it's cost $400. Way outta print. We have digitized it at the internet archive available 300 library if people would like to see it.

I, I, I'm intrigued by trying to build back his library, right? We have now the catalog that was rediscovered in 2019, and we might be able to go, what could we learn by trying to rebuild his library? What would it shed outside of just a group of scholars? Why would we want to do this? 

Edward Wilson-Lee: I mean, well, so I have lots of reasons and there'll be lots of reasons I suppose, for people [00:31:00] trying to do things like what you are doing.

First of all, you know, there's a lost world of information in these catalogs and in these books in a sense, because we look, we often look back in history and at the things that interest us at work. We want to know how. Where we ended up at started. Right. So we tend to have very kind of narrow and blinkered views on what is interesting in history and actually having a sense of what was important to them then, which is one of the things that, you know, then summarizing these books and telling us what then they thought about them helps to do.

That's very exciting for me. But, you know, I think for people trying to think about the modern age and the lessons that this has for the internet and things like the internet archive, the real warning that it provides that information. Explosions information revolution are moments of great possibility, but also great peril, right?

They might allow us to immensely expand our awareness of the world, our connectivity to the world, the range of things that [00:32:00] we are interested in. The disorientation that it provokes can also be a powerful weapon for people to step in and provide comforting things that simply. Reflect you back at yourself, give you versions, comforting vision, visions of what the world is like, which is really what the world is like for you.

Right? So I think this is a kind of moment which we're sitting at, at the moment, I think, you know, uh, and Hernandez's Library. One of the reasons I was drawn to it to begin with is because of all of the different organization systems that it, it tried, none of them were on the basis of. Along national lines right.

To begin with. They didn't put the books with, you know, the French books here and the Spanish books there. And in the ways that libraries nowadays are often organized in those ways, which kind of rarey and, and, and solidify the idea of nations that we're all very different and what the Spanish are talking about and what the Americans are talking about and what the, you know, Australians are talking about are different things.

And they actually hide the extent to which we're all thinking about the same things. Right? So Hernandez library wasn't. Organized upon those lines, but the libraries in the [00:33:00] generation after that started to be founded as, as national libraries to collect national collections and to construct a story of the nation as somehow unique and different and singular.

And I think, again, that's something that we're, you know, we're really at a, at a dangerous moment where the possibilities of the internet. Being connected to all of you across the world is fantastic. But on the other hand, there's a real danger that one response to the challenges of the scale of information is to write algorithms, which essentially give you things that are like you, right?

That are like what you're already interested in, like. What people like you think and that makes all sorts of assumption about who you are and what people like you are like, and, and you know who is different from you. And again, these tend to end up solidifying our beliefs that we're different from people and creating.

Disconnection, creating distance and, and rupture rather than connection, which, you know, really, there should be a moment where we're all, you know, able to talk to each other and read each other's [00:34:00] things and learn about each other in, in great ways. But there's a danger that that doesn't happen. And then I, I think is a lesson that Hernando's library, you know, 

Brewster Kahle: holds for all of us.

That's, that's, that's terrific about the general internet age and the rebirth of all ISTs. If there are people that can think about all, and I think Hernando is one of those. Where Project Gutenberg's, Michael Hart, where there's the internet archive, uh, work, there's Google Books, the idea of trying to build libraries of it all, and they're all coming from outside of the system.

So is there an analogy of what was going on for Nandos and is thinking she's sort of what's going on? Now and what can we learn from the fate of his library and what should we do differently? I come as a historian, what? What would be the forward path to this world that you would suggest? 

Edward Wilson-Lee: Well, I mean, I, I think, as I say, I think you're right that it, that it helps to be an outsider in some ways.

So Hernando was not a humanist, right? He wasn't particularly well learned in Greek and Latin. He [00:35:00] didn't belong to an institution or, or anything like that. And in some ways, his kind of move fast and break things attitude or the equivalent in a 16th century equivalent was what allowed him kind of like his father to a certain extent.

His father's extraordinary self-belief was what allowed him to keep sailing west. For 40 days when you know, no, when, when anyone, anyone else would tell you that was crazy. So I think Hernando had a, a kind of similar self-belief and counter institutional mentality in some ways that, that enabled him to do that in terms of what it could teach us for the present day.

I mean, I say I think one of the, you know, one of the, one of the things about the internet archive is, and it's. Parallels with Hernando's project is it's refusal to be dictated to by the media that is collecting. Right? So Hernando collected, you know, one of the interesting things he's collecting plants and images and music and map data and all sorts of things, and thinking across these things and how they, they connect to each other, right?

Whereas [00:36:00] deciding that a collection should be. Determined by the media in which it was produced, that there should be a collection of videos or books or, you know, really ends up obscuring the ways in which these things are thinking about the same things in different ways and actually might helpfully and productively teach people looking at different, you know, different media, different things.

So I think that's a kind of fantastic way forward to not be hampered by. Received notions of media and what they contain, right? The books do this and videos do that, and pictures do the other. But let's see the 

Brewster Kahle: best justification I've heard for all the different media types at the archive. So thank you for giving us a historical basis for that.

Chris Freeland: So a big thank you to Edward Wilson Lee for joining us today and for, sharing Hernando's story to Brewster for bringing this book to the awareness of people at the internet archive, and to me and to, encouraging us to hold this conversation today.

Thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. [00:37:00] Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow.