Time out for a good book

Horological books for a general readership can be patchy affairs, though there’s a good way to determine if one should bother diving in: is there an index worthy of the name and, better still, a bibliography? Happily, this year brings us two of the most comprehensively indexed and downright fascinating books in many years – indispensable reading for horophiles of every stripe.

Telegraph Time contributor Nicholas Foulkes turns the clock back to zero and beyond in Time Tamed: The Remarkable Story of Humanity’s Quest to Measure Time (Simon & Schuster, £25). Beginning with inscribed Paleolithic bones and Egyptian water clocks, Foulkes devotes each chapter to a different example of historic timekeeping, up to the Omega Speedmaster that landed on the moon with Buzz Aldrin a half-century ago.

The stories of landmarks like Richard of Wallingford’s astronomical clock and John Harrison’s H5 Chronometer are enthrallingly recounted, along with curios like the Jacobean pocket watch encased in an emerald discovered at Cheapside in 1912.

While Foulkes stops time in 1969, Alexander Barter takes things up to the end of the century in The Watch: A 20th Century Style History (Prestel Publishing, £45). An auction house consultant and vintage watch dealer, Barter charts the evolution of the wristwatch from pocket to wrist, and from hand-wound to automatic to quartz, against the backdrop of the grand events and economic twists and turns of the 1900s. He is helped along the way with lavish photography and design. TB