Time

Cartographies of Time: A Visual History of the Timeline

by Maria Popova

A chronology of one of our most inescapable metaphors, or what Macbeth has to do with Galileo.

I was recently asked to select my all-time favorite books for the lovely Ideal Bookshelfproject by The Paris Review’s Thessaly la Force and artist Jane Mount. Despite the near-impossible task of shrinking my boundless bibliophilia to a modest list of dozen or so titles, I was eventually able to do it, and the selection included Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (public library |IndieBound) by Daniel Rosenberg andAnthony Grafton — among both my 7 favorite books on maps and my 7 favorite books on time, this lavish collection of illustrated timelines traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present, featuring everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain./.../