“The great benefit of this book of epitomes is very obvious,” wrote Colón’s assistant Juan Pérez, “because it briefly lets you know the essentials of what a book deals with at length. And if a man can’t have many books to read, at least he will have one that will give him an indication of what is dealt with in many, so that if he gets a good impression of a book and the subject it deals with, he will buy it, and if not he will leave it; and he won’t be fooled in(to) buying it, because there are many books with grandiose and inflated titles that then fail to deliver on their promise, and printers do this to fool people.”

With these words, ironically, Juan Pérez overstated the usefulness of the Book of Epitomes for the cautious buyer in a 16th-century bookshop. Such a buyer would want to know about editions – is this one a knock-off with poor illustrations? is that one just a delinquent reprint with a new title page? – and the Epitomes would disappoint. Instead, what the book provides is information about works found in Colón’s library, abstracted from the volumes that happen to contain them. From our perspective, this gives us a wide-ranging survey of what a 16th-century reader might have found interesting.

The epitomes are all anonymous, and each will have been written by Colón or, more likely, a hired sumista (summarizer). Their length varies from a few lines to several pages, though this will not simply reflect their contemporary importance, as some works (and indeed some editions) will have lent themselves more readily to long section-by-section summaries. The best way to get a sense of the approach and style of the epitomes is to see the examples that we provide here.