Columbus, Fernando:

$950 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

EL TESTAMENTO DE HERNANDO COLON [spine title]. A highly detailed and magnificently reproduced facsimile of the last will and testament of Fernando Columbus (or Hernán Colón, in his native Spanish), second son of the great explorer, originally created at Seville in 1539. Fernando accompanied his father on his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502, and is perhaps best known as the author of his father's first biography, considered one of the most important (and in many cases, the only) sources for the life of Columbus. Fernando was also a humanist and a great book collector, and much of the text of this testament concerns the distribution and care of his library (which included the books he inherited from his father). It is perhaps thanks to the detailed instructions in this document that nearly half of the 15,000-volume collection (including nearly 1200 incunables and hundreds of Dürer prints) survives today at the Institución Colombina, at the Cathedral of Seville. This testament gives precise rules for the ordering and storage of the books, names a full-time librarian (Juan Pérez), and provides rules for expanding the collection.This extremely faithful facsimile recreates the original document in color, extent, and size, and has been rendered at a level of detail down to edge wear, dampstaining, and even the cutting of precise worm trails. This copy is without the volume of commentary in Spanish which originally accompanied the facsimile. From an edition limited to 980 copi

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