While his father sailed across the ocean to explore the boundaries of the known world, Hernando ColÔon sought to surpass Columbus's achievements by building a library that would include "all books, in all languages and on all subjects." He spent his life travelling-- first to the New World with his father in 1502, surviving through shipwreck and a bloody mutiny off the coast of Jamaica, and later, throughout Europe, amassing a collection based on the modern conviction that a truly great library should include the kind of material dismissed as ephemeral trash: ballads, pornography, newsletters, popular images, romances, fables. Using an invented system of hieroglyphs he meticulously catalogued every item in his library, devising the first ever search engine for his rich profusion of books and images and music. Wilson-Lee tells of the life and times of this first genius of the print age.