This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Sometimes a mark in a book makes you feel as if you know someone. In this case, it’s an image on a bookplate of a cramped space filled with books, some splayed out, some haphazardly piled (image 1). Barely discernible behind the wings of one giant volume are the hands and cap of a man, reading. He’s hunched over in concentration or absorption (his expression isn’t visible). The Latin motto around the square image reads “Satis Temporis Non Est Nobis” or “For us, there is not enough time.”

Besides the most obvious meaning of this phrase, a kind of memento mori about the brevity of life, there’s also a separate subtext for bibliophiles like us: there’s never enough time to read the books we want, and never enough books about time. I know as a reader I heavily identify with the first part of that subtext and as a librarian at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), the second. This bookplate, and the book it adorns, belonged to the late Silvio Bedini (1917-2007).

A colorful American historian and longtime scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, Bedini was a bibliophile and horologist of the first order. He helped create the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian, a repository of rare books and manuscripts on astronomy, chemistry, and more. At HSNY, we recently acquired a selection of books from Bedini’s personal library, which had been sold to Second Story Books in Washington, D.C.

Bedini wrote many books about timekeeping, which we have in our library at HSNY, but he had diverse research interests, including dominoes, elephants, and incense, wrote The Washington Post in an obituary after he died in 2007 (see image 2, a collection of books by Bedini). He wrote the first biography of noted Black scholar and horologist Benjamin Banneker. Bedini was, by all reports, a “walking encyclopedia”: his son Peter called him a collector of “tidbits” like “how the Coca-Cola bottle got its shape, what is the most poisonous snake, how to write and break codes.” (This last “tidbit” came in handy when Bedini reportedly worked to develop methods for Allied POWs to send secret messages during World War II.)

I would love to highlight all 16 magnificent Bedini books we acquired, now settling into their cozy home at HSNY! But alas, I have only so many column inches, so I’ll include just enough to tempt you to the library to see these treasures. I’ll start with the oldest, then the rarest.

If you’ve been to our library, you’ve probably heard my spiel about the rare books section and our oldest book, a Latin chronology published in 1652 by Jesuit theologian Denis Pétau. Well, Pétau has been dethroned! Our new champion, clocking in at a devastatingly ancient 451 years old, is “Trattato Dell’Uso Della Sfera” by Ignazio Danti. Ding ding ding, the belt is yours, Danti!

Now, age isn’t everything when it comes to rare books (see my next item for an example) but even if it hadn’t been printed back in 1573, this book is cool (image 3 shows the title page). It’s the first book published in Italy about the astrolabe. An astrolabe is a multifunctional star chart, either flat or spherical, that can make complicated navigational and horological calculations. In the Early Modern period, astronomical clocks based on the astrolabe included moving models of the positions of planets and stars. (If you want to learn more about how to operate an astrolabe, I found this explanation from the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford relatively accessible.)

But this book isn’t just about the astrolabe itself; it also covers other astronomical and astrological topics, including the signs of the zodiac. Image 4 shows what looks to me like a Universal Equinoctial Ring Dial–a mouthful of a name, but simply a type of sundial used to determine time at sea at a given latitude. However, a number of these navigational devices look similar, including a mariner’s astrolabe and a nocturnal, and although I’m sure Bedini could tell me more, the text is not very clear about the divisions. The device includes a familiar division of time into 24 segments on the outer rim of a thick plate.

Ignazio Danti (not to be confused with his more famous Florentine counterpart, the divine Dante Alighieri) was somewhat like Silvio Bedini himself–a polymathic mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic bishop. He created magnificent maps, globes, and scientific instruments, including astrolabes. Unlike the author of our now second-oldest book, Danti published in Italian, using the common tongue rather than Latin to appeal to a broader audience.

The second Bedini book I want to highlight is another Italian marvel, Antonio Cagnoli’s “De’Due Orologi Italiano E Francese.” Though this book was published in 1787 (practically yesterday compared to Danti) the copy in our library is one of only a few known to exist in the world (title page, image 5).

This book focuses on “Italian time,” a traditional method of timekeeping where a day began at sunset with the hour 1, and ended at the next sunset with hour 24. Because the system made sunset its benchmark, it was helpful for people to figure out how much time they had left before it got dark and they could no longer work without artificial light. You can see an example of a clock with a dial showing Italian hours in this article about St Mark’s Clock in Venice. Around the time Cagnoli’s book was published, Italians were already switching over to what is called in the book “French time,” which was the standard in many parts of Europe. Napoleon’s invasion of Italy a few years later may have hastened this conversion.

Anyone who’s read my previous articles knows I’m somewhat obsessed with marginalia–the things people write in books, the scrawls and smudges that show how people really use and love them. In image 6, you can see some handwritten annotations in “De’Due Orologi Italiano E Francese.” On the left, a cartoon pointing hand (called a manicule) denotes a part of the text that a reader found important, much like an 18th-century highlighter. It points to a section about the time issues that result from the fact that the length of the day on Earth varies depending on the season–the idea of solar versus sidereal time. Below, penciled horological calculations try to work out something about how the number of minutes in a day changes as the season changes. Perhaps the reader was a little bit confused by the text, because there’s a lone question mark hovering in the right-hand margin.

You’ll notice that both of these books are in Italian. Bedini, though from Connecticut, certainly collected many books in Italian, and I took the opportunity of the book sale to enhance our relatively slim collections in that language (we have far more in German and French). Aside from the bookplates, some of the books show other marks of Bedini’s usage and indications of his interest.

In a 1954 catalog of objects in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence (now Museo Galileo), red pencil circles document specific items he must have found intriguing, such as two Italian telescopes made out of cardboard in the 17th century. Bedini was clearly fascinated by the shared history of early scientific instruments, how things like the microscope, the telescope, and the sundial fit together to help us explain and measure our complicated world. Image 7 shows a photograph I found tucked in the same book. If you can identify the instrument in the photo, let me know.

The unidentified photo hints at other mysteries in Bedini’s books I have yet to explore. One book, for instance, appears to be a commemoration of the electric clocks of Lecce in southern Italy, which the author claims was on the cutting edge when it introduced public electric clocks in 1868. (Electric clocks as a whole were invented in 1840.) I’d love to learn more about why the small city of Lecce became a beacon of the electric clock revolution, and if any of their 19th-century clocks are still there today.

Similarly, I’m now fascinated by the career of James Ferguson, a Scottish astronomer who published a volume of collected lectures in 1825 (title page, image 8). Is the math accurate on his calculation showing “the mean time of any New or Full Moon, or Eclipse, from the creation of the world to the year of Christ 5800”? Has anyone ever tried to build his surreal-looking “universal dial” (image 9) which shows the time on different parts of the globe by the use of shadows only?

I don’t currently know the answers to these questions, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Bedini’s books, once in his home or office in Washington, now in our library in Manhattan, are a papery bridge between scholars of different generations. Just touching them, smelling them, I can feel the intensity of Bedini’s enthusiasm for knowledge–not just “tidbits,” but rather whole reams of esoteric information and uncovered stories. In using these books, I hope visitors to the library will be able to feel it too. And I hope Bedini would approve.