ERC Starting Grant · 2024
Half a century after Gutenberg’s invention, while Europe was awash with newly printed books, Hernando Colón (1488-1539), second son of Christopher Columbus, was the first, and last, individual who tried to keep physical track of the proliferation of knowledge. He not only purchased everything, incessantly, and everywhere, marking on the books place and date of purchase, the local price, and the conversion to Spanish currency; for accessing and reusing his colossal library, he and his ‘invisible technicians’ also developed a sophisticated cross-indexing and symbols system which is foundational in the history of bibliography and knowledge management. The Colombina library of Seville still…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.