This post is the fourth in a new series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

The Horological Society of New York’s (HSNY) oldest books (see image 1) were published in the 17th century–a century in which Galileo and Shakespeare died, Newton discovered the law of gravity, and tulip mania raged in the Netherlands.

We have several books from this period housed behind glass in the rare books section of our Jost Bürgi Research Library in Midtown. In looking at the images below, you might be thinking, “those books don’t look 350 years old–they look better than some paperbacks I still have from the 70s.” There are a few reasons for this phenomenon, the main one being that during this period, and up until the early 19th century, European paper was made out of old linen rags rather than wood pulp. This early paper was very durable and less acidic than later wood-pulp paper, so earlier books generally tend to hold up better than later ones.

Our earliest books are in Latin and French. One of our oldest (see image 2) is titled in the long 17th-century style: D. Petauii…Rationarium Temporum…In quo aetatum omnium sacra profanaque historia chronologicis probationibus munita summatim traditur. The very wordy title, which I’ve already shortened for ease of reading, includes the author’s name, Denis Pétau, rendered in Latin as D. Petauii. The rest of the title promises to tell over thirteen chapters “the sacred and profane history of all ages,” including “chronological proof” of when certain events occurred. Our copy was printed in Paris in 1652.

Surprisingly, given its length, the book is an abridged and summarized version of Pétau’s previous work. It attempts to put world historical events in order, a difficult task when taking into account different calendars in use in different eras and the relatively limited number of sources the author would have had access to. Pétau was a Jesuit theologian (and librarian!) whose work on chronology was highly influential, although he also wrote about the history of Christian doctrine and other historical and religious topics. You can browse a later version of this oft-translated text here.

Tablettes Chronologiques (see image 3), published in Paris thirty years later, is also a work of chronology, covering the whole history of the church “in the East and the West,” including “the ecclesiastical authors” and “the schisms, heresies & opinions which have been condemned.” The title page tells us the book is a reference work “for those who read sacred history.” This book lays out history more schematically, as its title suggests (“tablettes” means “tables”). The text is arranged as tables and includes a shorthand system of symbols for different professions and identities, shown in image 3, on the left hand page. One symbol denotes a poet, while another indicates a mathematician.

Another 17th century chronology in HSNY’s library, Les Elemens De L’Histoire (1696), has a bit more of a secular focus, including a long section about the history of noble families and their coats of arms, as well as the official symbols for royal government positions in different countries (see image 4.)

Although all of the books I’ve mentioned so far talk about time, none of them specifically addresses timekeeping or the tools that people invented to try to tell time. One book that starts to talk about horological instruments, published in 1691, is Traité D’Horlogiographie, a French treatise that discusses solar clocks and navigational devices. It has dozens of illustrations showing the most advanced scientific instruments of the time. We have a copy in our library, which is open to the public on weekdays.

The gorgeous frontispiece (see image 5) depicts a castle flying a flag bearing the phrase “Rien sans vous” (“Nothing without you”), a motto that often refers to the influence of God and can be found in emblem books from this period. However, in this context one could also read it as indicating the importance of the celestial bodies, without which we wouldn’t be able to tell time or navigate. The scene around the castle shows the main subjects of the book: the stars, the sun, ships, a compass, navigational instruments, and geometric models. The image demonstrates how closely horology has always been tied to marine navigation and to astronomy.

This book has two fold-out illustrations (see image 6) and about 70 other plates (see image 7) designed to help the reader learn the science of celestial navigation. Sundials are some of the oldest known timekeeping devices, and knowing how to read the time by the sun continued to be an important skill for navigators in the 17th century. The images demonstrate how the sun casts specific shadows when it’s at different angles to the horizon. Other diagrams in the volume show how to use the starry sky instead of the sun. In a future post, I’ll cover how 18th century inventors figured out how to accurately determine time at sea, which revolutionized navigation.

Our copy of Traité D’Horlogiographie has a French inscription, probably from shortly after the book’s publication, that roughly reads “Make, O God, make me love you more than my possessions, more than myself” (see image 8). The book’s author was a monk, and it seems, given this prayer, that the owner of this copy too was a religious person, perhaps even a fellow member of a religious order.

This book, however, is not wholly focused on Christian theological understandings of the universe. As you can see in images 9 and 10, the book includes the signs of the Western Zodiac, still recognizable today, and a palmistry diagram. As it is now, astrology was relatively popular during this period. Astrologers made predictions based on both in-person observations and diagrams in books. Our library contains a shelf of books on astrology, a record of the human quest to make sense of the vast, dazzling, and sometimes imperceptible sweep of existence.

Our 17th century books are small in number, but diverse in subject. Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, the previous owner of these books and HSNY’s librarian emeritus, defines horology very broadly. If you want to read about calendars, navigation, empire, philosophy, or religious ideas about time, we probably have something that will interest you. Time is what you make of it.