Epistola Christofori Colom (A Letter of Christopher Columbus), Plannck's corrected Latin edition

A plain, unillustrated eight-page pamphlet, printed in Rome by Stephan Plannck within weeks of Columbus's return to Spain in 1493, in the corrected Latin state that credits Queen Isabel alongside Ferdinand of Aragon. This copy has belonged to the Library of Congress since 25 January 1946 and is the exemplar the Library digitized as World Digital Library item 90.

It is not the copy of this same edition that was stolen from Florence's Biblioteca Riccardiana, passed through a Swiss collector and a 1992 Christie's sale, sat undetected in the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2016, and was then forensically exposed and returned to Italy. That is a different physical copy of the identical Plannck printing, and its story belongs to that copy, now back in Florence, not to this one.

The distinction matters because this exact edition has been targeted for theft and forgery at least four times in half a century, at four different libraries on two continents. Establishing which specific object a digitized plate depicts is not a formality here; it is the whole problem.

What the object physically is

Eight pages, twenty centimetres tall, a single signed gathering, no woodcuts, no decorated initials, no colophon naming printer or date. The title is taken from the caption at the head of the first leaf: Epistola Christofori Colom, cui etas nostra multum debet, de Insulis Indie supra Gangem nuper inventis, addressed to the royal treasurer Gabriel Sanchez. It is a commercial news pamphlet, set and printed as fast as Stephan Plannck's Rome shop could manage, and it looks like one.

The Library of Congress's copy, call number Incun. 1493 .C6, carries a later fine binding signed by the London bindery Riviere & Son, and is bound together with a nineteenth-century companion piece: an 1816 English translation of the same letter, reprinted from the Edinburgh Review, probably removed from a larger unidentified publication and added to the volume at some later point. The two pieces now share one binding and one Library of Congress catalog entry for the bound volume, though they are catalogued individually as well.

How the news reached Rome, in Latin, within a month

Columbus's Spanish letter announcing his discoveries was first printed in Barcelona by Pedro Posa, dated to soon after 4 March 1493. A Latin translation, made by an Aragonese cleric resident in Rome, Leandro di Cosco, followed within weeks: Plannck's Rome printing is dated by every standard incunabula reference to after 29 April 1493, the date embedded in the text itself rather than a printed colophon. Di Cosco is reported to have translated the letter at the request of Bishop Bernardino Carvajal, the Spanish crown's ambassador in Rome, which makes the translation itself an act of diplomatic publicity rather than a private literary exercise.

Plannck's Latin version is the edition that actually carried the news across the rest of Europe. Within the same year, further Latin printings followed in Basel (Michael Furter, for Johann Bergmann, with woodcut illustrations added), Paris (Guy Marchant) and Antwerp (Thierry Martens), alongside a further Rome printing by Plannck's remaining local rival, Eucharius Silber. All are catalogued by the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke as printed 'after 29 April 1493', which is a bibliographical inference from the text, not four independently dated imprints; it records how quickly the letter moved, not the exact day each city set type.

The correction: an omission and its fix

Plannck actually printed the Latin letter twice. In the first Roman printing, the dedicatory opening credits the expedition to Ferdinand of Aragon alone; it misnames the treasurer 'Raphael Sanxis' and the translator 'Aliander de Cosco'. In a second setting, corrected within the same year, the opening now credits both Ferdinand and Isabel, the treasurer's name is corrected to 'Gabriel Sanchis' and the translator to 'Leander de Cosco'. This Library of Congress copy is the corrected state: E.D. Church's catalogue calls it in so many words 'Plannck's second or corrected edition', and the title as transcribed in the Library's own record already carries 'Helisabet' alongside 'Fernandi' in the dedication.

One proposed explanation for the correction is diplomatic complaint from Castilian representatives in Rome, unhappy at seeing Isabel dropped from the announcement of an expedition she had personally sponsored. That explanation is plausible and repeated in more than one secondary account, but no source consulted for this record produces a document recording the complaint itself; it is inference from the fact of the correction, not a documented event, and this record treats it as such.

This copy's own history at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress's catalog record for this exact copy carries one specific, dated note: 'LC copy has acquisition no. 1035E1 dated 1-25-[19]46.' That is 25 January 1946. The record also notes the binding is signed by Riviere & Son, a London bindery. Beyond the accession number, the record gives no earlier owner, dealer or collection name for this particular copy; its history before 1946 is not stated in the catalog description consulted.

The pamphlet sits within the Library's Incunabula Collection and its Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and is grouped online under the Library's 'Rare Book Selections' and its 'Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier' presentation. It was digitized and issued as World Digital Library item 90, the file now hosted on Wikimedia Commons as a public-domain photographic reproduction.

Establishing which copy this is, and which it is not

The Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections Division is known to hold more than one Columbus-letter item, and at least one Columbus-letter copy has passed through Library of Congress custody under circumstances that had nothing to do with an ordinary 1946 accession: a copy of this identical Plannck corrected edition was stolen from Florence's Biblioteca Riccardiana, surfaced through a Swiss collector in 1990, was sold at Christie's New York in 1992, was donated to the Library of Congress in 2004, and was identified as stolen and forensically confirmed in 2012, then formally returned to Italy in May 2016 (detailed below).

The dates rule out a mix-up. This copy's own Library of Congress catalog note places its accession fourteen years before Columbus scholarship even had electronic incunabula censuses, in January 1946, a full fifty-eight years before the Riccardiana copy's 2004 donation and seventy years before that copy's 2016 repatriation. A copy the Library has held continuously since 1946 cannot be the same physical object that only entered Library custody in 2004 and left again in 2016. On that basis this record treats World Digital Library item 90 as the Library's own, ordinarily acquired copy, not the returned Riccardiana exemplar, and states its current custodian as the Library of Congress rather than the Biblioteca Riccardiana.

The Riccardiana Library's copy: theft, forgery and detection

This section concerns a different physical copy of the same Plannck corrected edition, not the object catalogued above, and is included as context for how vulnerable this print run has proven to theft.

The Riccardiana Library in Florence held its copy of the letter bound into a volume together with 42 other incunabula. At some undetermined date the genuine leaves were removed and replaced with a forgery good enough to go undetected on the library's own shelves for years. The Riccardiana's then director floated a theory that the theft occurred around 1950 or 1951; the forensic evidence developed later pointed to different, and disputed, conclusions, and no source consulted resolves the true date. The forged substitute was printed from a photographic plate onto paper that laboratory analysis found to be roughly a century younger than 1493, with the library's ownership stamp removed using bleach and the surrounding text retouched to disguise the erasure; the stitching and page dimensions of the forged gathering also did not match the genuine pattern.

The genuine, stolen leaves reached a Swiss collector by 1990, were consigned to Christie's in New York and sold there in 1992 for $330,000, and were donated to the Library of Congress in 2004 by a collector whose identity the US ambassador to Italy declined to disclose while the investigation was still active; no source consulted for this record names that donor. Homeland Security Investigations received a tip in 2012 that the Riccardiana's own copy was a forgery, and an eight-year joint investigation followed, run out of HSI's Wilmington, Delaware field office with Assistant US Attorney Jamie McCall, HSI special agent Mark Olexa, the Carabinieri's cultural-heritage squad under Captain Giovanni Prisco, and outside experts including Princeton's Paul Needham and the rare-book dealer Jay Dillon, who first spotted the match: 'you can't have two books with the same random brown spots in the margins. It's just impossible,' he told CBS News, describing how identical foxing marks on the forged Riccardiana leaves and the leaves then sitting in the Library of Congress gave away that they were the same physical sheets, forged and genuine halves of one theft. Smithsonian Institution specialists carried out further authentication work. The genuine letter was formally repatriated at a ceremony at the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome on 18 May 2016; Italy's culture minister, Dario Franceschini, remarked on the letter having made 'the same trip back and forth from America' as Columbus himself, five centuries on. Franceschini stated the letter would return specifically to the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, its original home. Days later, Maria Paola Profumo, director of the Galata Sea Museum in Columbus's native Genoa, wrote to Franceschini asking that her museum be given custody instead, to display the letter rather than return it to storage; no source consulted records the outcome of that request. No individual has been named or charged, in any source consulted, with the original theft or the manufacture of the forgery.

Not an isolated case: the same print run, targeted repeatedly

The Riccardiana theft was one of at least four thefts of Columbus-letter copies identified by the same joint US-Italian investigation. A copy of this identical Plannck corrected edition was stolen from the Vatican Apostolic Library at an unknown date before 2007 and replaced with a substitute; it had been bought in 2004 for $875,000 by the Atlanta collector David Parsons, whose widow relinquished her claim after his 2014 death, and it was returned to the Vatican on 14 June 2018. A copy from Spain's National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona was likewise stolen, forged and eventually returned to Spain. A copy of Plannck's earlier, uncorrected first edition, missing from Venice's Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana since an inventory check placed its disappearance between 1985 and 1988, was traced to a US private collection and recovered in 2023, the fourth recovery in the series. Genuine, undisputed copies of Plannck's edition of this letter also continue to change hands on the open market: a copy that had spent close to a century in a private Swiss library sold at Christie's in October 2023 for $3,922,000, against a $950,000 estimate, roughly twelve times the hammer price the stolen Riccardiana copy made at Christie's in 1992, a gap that reflects three decades of market appreciation for the material as much as any difference in the two copies themselves.

Bibliographies place the number of surviving copies of Plannck's Latin printings, across both the first and corrected states, at roughly thirty institutional copies plus a small number in private hands, with the Spanish Barcelona original rarer still: only one Spanish-language copy of the letter to Santangel is recorded, at the New York Public Library. Against that population, four confirmed thefts and forgeries of this specific print run is a strikingly high proportion, and is the reason this record treats copy-identity as a load-bearing question rather than a footnote.

A commercial pamphlet, not a devotional or symbolic object

Nothing in the sources consulted suggests the letter's material form carried religious, ceremonial or symbolic freight beyond its function as a news report. It was set in plain roman type on ordinary paper, without illustration in Plannck's Rome printing (the Basel edition of the same year did add woodcuts, a different publisher's choice for a different market), and its purpose was explicitly promotional: to announce a discovery and secure backing for a second voyage, addressed to a royal treasurer rather than a devotional patron. The absence of an iconographic or devotional programme is itself the honest finding here, not an omission; this is a fifteenth-century newsletter, and its later value is a function of what it reports, not of any meaning invested in the object by its makers.

What has since been invested in it is entirely modern: the pamphlet has become one of the most fought-over classes of printed object in the antiquities and rare-book trade specifically because it is the first printed announcement of the European encounter with the Americas, a status assigned retrospectively by the very market and law-enforcement history recounted above.

What remains unresolved

Two separate, real objects sit behind this record's subject matter: the Library of Congress's own copy, which is what this record describes and what the accompanying digitized image shows, and the Riccardiana Library's copy, whose theft and repatriation supply the case's notoriety but which is a different physical exemplar now returned to Florence. Several factual gaps remain on both sides of that division, listed below, and none of them are bridged with a guess in this record.