*A selection of marbled book cases at HSNY. These are actually custom boxes that protect rare books, not the books themselves.*

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by Head Librarian Miranda Marraccini.

When visitors come to our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), we encourage them to pull books off the shelf that catch their eye. Sometimes, what draws people in is obvious: a big-name watch brand in the title, the sparkle of a diamond-set bezel on the cover, a book that looks ancient. Other times it’s something quirkier. One of the best-thumbed books in our collection is the straightforwardly named “Problems in Time and Space.”

Why, you might ask, would visitors pick out this dry-sounding textbook from 1909? It’s because the book has a Star of David on the binding, so many people assume it must be about connections between Judaism and horology–a subject that we do indeed have a few books about (for instance, “Understanding the Jewish Calendar” and “The Watchmakers.”)

But “Problems in Time and Space” uses the Star of David only as a hexagram, a simple astronomical symbol, just like a five-pointed star. It doesn’t actually discuss Judaism at all. Images 1 and 2 show the spine and cover of the book, apparently a magnet for bookshelf browsers.

The book covers topics including astronomical measurement, the magnetism of the Earth, and the historical development of the calendar. Images 3 and 4 are two illustrations from the book, one showing the path of Earth’s axis as it is affected by precession and nutation, and one demonstrating the hours of daylight and dark at the solstices and equinoxes.

Based on my own experience browsing our shelves, something about astronomy seems to inspire a beautiful book–the tapestry swirl of a distant galaxy against the cold blue-black of the void. One of our most understated little books, “The Orbs of Heaven” (1865), nonetheless makes an attempt to represent the vast, terrifying beauty of the universe in very little space.

It caught my eye on the shelf because of the binding (image 5), a gold-stamped cloth emblazoned with images of Saturn and other stars and planets, along with a telescope and the names of important astronomers throughout history: Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Herschel.

My favorite illustrations are the six nebulae at the end, rendered in an exquisite deep blue that seems to have faded very little with time; in image 6, “the whirlpool or spiral nebula as seen through Lord Rosse’s Telescope.” In an era before easy photographic reproduction, the illustrators used engraving to produce an evocative image, with fine lines and speckles of white against the saturated background conveying the swirling pinpricks of distant suns.

Based on a number of pencil inscriptions scrawled in its first few pages, I think this copy might have belonged to American astronomer John Adelbert Parkhurst, who was prominent enough to get a crater named after him on the moon! So the book in our library isn’t the only memorial to the honorable Professor Parkhurst, an expert in photometry. The surface of the moon remembers him too.

Aside from astronomy, another topic that seems to inspire beautiful bindings is sundials. During the early 20th century, sundials emerged as an acceptable horological topic for female writers to pursue–sundials were decorative; they belonged in the garden, which was often considered a wife’s domain; and they had historical associations with literature and art, fields in which women were more represented than in the sciences.

Alice Morse Earle of Brooklyn was one such woman, and her “Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday” (1902) is one such beautiful book in our library (image 7). As the title suggests, it covers both sundials and roses. But in her foreword, Earle makes her fascination with book design very clear, spending two out of four pages describing in detail her minute decisions about the type, decoration, and binding of the book.

Earle has copied the decorative initials (larger, elaborately designed letters at the beginning of each section) from “ancient volumes, many of them being appropriately old herbals and books on husbandry.” She even supplies specific references for her typography choices: “A fine example of an heraldic capital is the old black-letter H shown on page 233, from a book printed in Paris in 1514.” In image 8, you can see just how hard these initial letters can be to read–proving that style and substance, though both important, are not always aligned in book design.

Earle, a historian of Colonial American life, dedicated the book to her adult daughter Mary “to commemorate her first summer with her own garden and sundial” after her marriage (image 9). She wrote in her inscription: “May the motto of her dial be that of her life[:] I mark only sunny hours.” For Earle, this book celebrated a connection between generations at a moment full of hope and optimism, like the first roses of the summer coming into bloom.

What Earle’s book lacks, however, is color. “A Book of Sundials,” published in this edition in 1922, fixes that with a color cover (image 10) and eight tipped-in color illustrations. Most of the book focuses on sundial mottos, brief phrases usually in Latin or English, that express some pithy sentiment about time passing. These can be as simple as “Carpe Diem,” as annoying as “I note the time that you waste,” or as hardcore as “Mors de die accelerat” (“Every day brings death nearer.”) These memento mori motifs make a funny textual juxtaposition with the volume’s vivid, bucolic illustrations of sundials in perpetually sunny gardens (image 11).

So far we’ve looked at gorgeous stars and gorgeous flowers, books of the sky and books of the earth. But not everything in our library that looks good covers a lofty subject. I want to assure you that practical books can also be pretty, if someone cares enough. Take “Know the Escapement,” published in the 1940s by married couple Sarah and Homer Barkus, and one of our original library books at HSNY. In addition to its many photographs and line drawings illustrating escapements and how they work, “Know the Escapement” is also tactile.

The front cover design (image 12) features a 3D embossed lever escapement on a swirly background. I wish you could feel the texture of the coated fabric that makes up the cover. It feels almost waterproof, as if you tossed it into the ocean in a moment of frustration during a particularly fraught escapement repair, it would emerge unscathed. However, please do not toss any of our library books into the ocean or any body of water.

The Barkuses were both watchmakers. According to the book’s introduction, Homer taught his wife the trade, and Sarah took to it like a horological duck to water: over the years, “a good-natured rivalry has developed between them; some customers prefer one, and some the other, to repair their watches.” The authors seem to have understood the importance of physical experience in watchmaking, since their Barkus Horological Laboratories also produced large-scale escapement models for classroom use.

Yes, even the most humble parts catalog can be beautiful, as in the case of the Elgin National Watch Company net price list from 1915 (see image 13.) Our copy is not in great condition, but its worn cover still boasts a winged Father Time holding a pocket watch and scythe, an early Elgin logo that has been characterized as “borderline creepy.”

It’s certainly eye-catching, with an Art Nouveau flourish accented in bright gold. As a material object, the catalog is a testament to the way that turn-of-the-century watch companies in America joined innovations in manufacturing with populist marketing practices. They built relatively precise watches at scale, and successfully democratized watch ownership. Just like the watches Elgin produced in 1915, this catalog is mass-produced, cheap, functional, and attractive.

If this article encourages you to judge a book by its cover, I celebrate your aesthetic preferences. You might choose something based on whimsy, and come out of the experience with a depth of knowledge you weren’t seeking or expecting. That’s what happened to me. That’s the library’s strange power, leading you forward through obscure passages toward an unknown fate. As one sundial motto has it, Ecce hora! Or, as the “Book of Sundials” translates: behold, the hour of destiny!

Reading Time at HSNY: The Bound and the Beautiful

HSNY Expands Educational Offerings with New Academic Programming