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

When it comes to watches, they come in all sizes. Bigger is not necessarily better. There are dainty dials, shining with miniature detail above equally minute movements, marvels of micromechanics. There are huge slabs that look like they need their own checked luggage tags. And there are medium-sized watches that try to be all things to all people–as ubiquitous as a Toyota Camry.

The same goes for books. Today I’ll share with you some of the biggest and smallest specimens in the HSNY library. Some are so large they could be used as solar shades (if we weren’t concerned about UV damage to the books) while others could be smuggled in your cheek.

The big books in the library were easy for me to find because, well, they announce their presence. They’re the Panerais in the room, beefy, all-around chonks. If you’re a librarian who works with them, you can go ahead and skip arm day. In image 1, you can see a selection of our biggest books, with two 750 mL bottles for scale. Their publication dates range from 1765 to 2023.

One prominent, incredibly unwieldy book in our collection is J. P. Morgan’s catalog of watches (the red book in image 1). This might sound familiar, because the name J. P. Morgan is even more omnipresent in American life than a Toyota Camry. Morgan, a financier, was a collector of many things, not just clocks and watches–a visit to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City will give you a sense of the scale of his collection of rare books, fine art, gems, and other objects. Morgan donated his watches to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913, where they remain to this day. We have a copy of Morgan’s illustrated collection catalog.

Morgan produced a very limited number of hand-colored editions of this catalog printed on vellum and finished with bits of real gold. One of these copies sold in 2012 for $26,000, and you can see a few pictures of the sumptuous illustrations here. In our library, we have a more modest facsimile in black and white, but even the facsimile is quite a rare book. Pound for pound, it’s also one of the heaviest in our collection at 13 pounds, 12 ounces, roughly the weight of a plump cat. It measures 15 inches tall by 12 inches wide and is over four inches thick (in image 2, a can of sparkling water for scale.)

Image 3, a plate from Morgan’s collection catalog, shows a silver watch in the shape of a skull, a popular motif when this watch was produced, around 1600. Watches of this type are intended as a kind of memento mori, meaning that every time you look at this watch, you should think about how you’re one second closer to your inevitable death. Its jaw unhinges to reveal the movement in its mouth. Snap, your time’s up!

In image 4, a relatively tamer watch from 1660, made by Henry Grendon, displaying an intricate engraved dial covered by an octagonal-cut rock crystal. The outer case, shown below the watch, is made of shagreen, which is processed shark or rayfish skin. Even though the color isn’t visible in this version, you can see the pebbly, bubbly texture of the shagreen, further ornamented by silver stars. The catalog’s enormous plates, replicating the details of a watch in real size, are what make the book so desirable and expensive, then as now.

One of the oldest big books in our library is Diderot’s “Encyclopédie,” coming in at 16 inches tall by 10 ½ inches wide (image 5, no trick photography used). Denis Diderot edited this famous work in the second half of the 18th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, when a group of authors hoped to present a secular, all-encompassing version of scientific and cultural knowledge. The encyclopedia consisted of 28 volumes, with a full 11 of them made up of plates (engraved, printed illustrations). We have only one part of one volume, which includes the plates from the section on Horlogerie. Because that’s the only one we care about, n’est-ce pas?

Our volume, published in 1765, contains 64 plates, alongside an editorial text that is 25 pages long, most of it a detailed description of each of the images. (The encyclopedia entry for “horology,” attributed to renowned horologist Ferdinand Berthoud, was published separately from these plates.)

I won’t be able to include many of these incredible images, but you can see high-resolution scans of all of them on this academic website: the first section contains 51 images while the second section contains 13 additional images.

Some plates illustrate movements by particular watchmakers, like the equation clock by Berthoud pictured in image 6. Some focus on horological tools, from those still familiar to a modern watchmaker (image 7) to those that may now appear less familiar (a machine for experiments on the friction of pivots in image 8). Other exploded schematics show all the parts of a watch or clock (image 9) or specific features like a repeater (image 10).

Our smallest books were harder for me to find in the library than the big ones, but once found, they excel in usefulness. Imagine, someone challenges your escapement knowledge in a social situation. But then…you pull out your four-by-six travel-sized copy of “An Analysis of the Lever Escapement” and confidently prove that it was in fact Thomas Mudge who first applied the detached lever escapement to watches around 1754. Your friends applaud wildly. You’re suddenly invited to the best parties. Your life changes forever.

One such practical pocket-book is another Berthoud classic originally published in 1759, “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres” (or “How to manage and regulate clocks and watches.") Our copy is a fourth edition that was printed in Paris in 1811 and measures about 6 ½ inches tall by 4 inches wide.

Berthoud greatly expanded on his earlier written work in “Essai sur L'horlogerie,” the first edition of which appeared in 1763. Here at HSNY, we have first and second editions in our rare books case. They’re gorgeous, but they’re a solid medium size, so I’m not going to write about them in detail here. You can come and see them in our library in person, or look at one of several high-quality scans of other copies on Google Books.

Lest you think we have only a big Berthoud (“Encyclopédie”), a medium Berthoud (“Essai”), and a small Berthoud (“L’Art de Conduire”), we actually have an EVEN TINIER Berthoud, this time in German. This book, originally published in 1828, is in fact a translation of “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres,” rendered in German as “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren umzugehen und sie zu reguliren” (see both mini Berthoud and micro Bethoud in image 11, with a loupe for scale). Our copy is a little speck of an edition printed in Berlin in 1989, and it measures just three inches by four inches. A glance at image 12 (with a hand for scale) shows this book reproduces in facsimile the original fraktur typeface, which many German publishers used well into the 20th century. If you’re not used to it, it can be difficult to read even in a larger size.

Image 13 shows three books together: a tiny reproduction image from “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren…”; the original fold-out plate from the small “L’Art de conduire…les montres”; and, on the bottom layer, a similar illustration from Diderot’s giant “Encyclopédie.” What is amazing is that the artist of the small engraving was able to convey nearly as much detail as the artist of the larger work, albeit with slightly less image clarity. Both images manage to show multiple aspects of movement construction, including a fusée.

You could imagine the tiny book being useful to a working watchmaker or clockmaker two hundred years ago. If you needed a quick consultation at the bench, you could keep this book within arm’s reach.

Similarly, in the 20th century, watchmakers used planners or diaries to organize their lives and to have convenient access to useful information; we have a collection of over 50 of these agendas in our library dating from 1878 through 1971. Image 14 shows them above a shelf of very large books including Morgan’s catalog and two copies of Diderot’s encyclopedia.

Image 15 shows a selection of colorful agendas in chronological order: 1906, 1924, 1939, and 1953. Two are in German and two in French. The 1924 and 1939 volumes show advertisements on the covers, but almost all of these agendas contain ads inside. In image 16, the same books are arranged in clockwise order from top left, and you can see the advertisements that grace the inside covers.

In 1906, for instance, the inside front cover shows an American-style factory in Schramberg, Germany called the Hamburg American Clock Factory, which later merged with Junghans. Two smokestacks rise high over the long brick buildings, where the ad says they are producing fantasy clocks, tall case clocks, hanging clocks and the “cheapest, most beautiful house clocks.”

I was surprised to find that the tabs inside the planners, indicating different sections, also highlight the ad pages, so that the 1924 agenda contains, for example, one tab leading directly to a table showing the price of postage, and one tab advertising Ulysse Nardin chronometers and watches. Then as now, brands no doubt paid for prime placement that would get them noticed by the largest number of working watchmakers.

These planners include other useful features like a loop for storing a pen or pencil, tables of common measurements, horological dictionaries, brand indices, a section for recording receipts, and a ruler. The ruler on the spine of the 1924 volume shows it’s a petite 15 centimeters long, just under 6 inches and shorter than an iPhone (image 17). Despite their useful nature, most of our copies don’t seem to have been written in, though there are exceptions where some watchmaker has scribbled a calculation or an appointment time.

A question this article raises is, why are some books so big and some are so small? This is not a stupid question. In fact, it’s so smart that I don’t have one answer for you. The answer is a combination of factors like cost of production, regularity of use, and the intended audience for the books when they were published. Was this book going to live in a library and serve as a reference for researchers? Or was it going to get carried around in a pocket and whipped out in the workshop? Did someone want to wow their visitors in a grand home, or impress their boss with their ability to fix something without assistance? Just like watches, books exist at an intersection of function, style, and artisanship, and some lean more heavily into one of these three priorities. A book isn’t just a bodiless container for information–it has its own corporeal presence, and it’s telling you more than just what’s in the text.