Reading Time At HSNY: Watch Your Tongue!
This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by HSNY’s librarian, Miranda Marraccini.
Wie spaet ist es? Vad är klockan? Horas, minutos y segundos. Do you feel like you stumbled into a Duolingo nightmare without warning? Don’t worry. I began with the phrases above to give you an idea of the quiet babble that takes place every day among the books in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY).
Since starting in my role here more than two years ago, I’ve understood the collection to be deeply multilingual. Every day I learn more words that help me find books and assist researchers: Kuckucksuhren, or cuckoo clocks in German. Orologi da polso, or wristwatches in Italian.
However, I’ve never undertaken a complete survey of the collection before, partly because, for the first part of my time here, we were still deep in the task of cataloging our books. Now that that work is largely done, I can use our new library catalog to find books by language of publication – and I encourage you to do it too! The advanced search function will help you filter the collection by language, as well as other options like subject and date range.
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My survey shows that HSNY boasts books and periodicals in at least 28 languages. I say “at least” because this accounting includes only cataloged materials and might be missing some of our multilingual ephemera–things like museum brochures, postcards, and parts manuals. Many books also include more than one language, including dictionaries for watchmakers that tell you what parts are called in different tongues, like the directly titled “Wie heißt das Teil?” (“What is the name of the part?”), pictured in image 1. Did you know that a mainspring-releasing pinion is called a rocchetto di disimpegno della molla in Italian? You can thank me for that tasty morsel of trivia for use at your next social gathering!
Sometimes one library catalog record leads to many volumes of reading material–like this one for “Brasil relojoeiro e joalheiro,” a monthly magazine on watchmaking and jewelry published in São Paulo. As you can see, we have over 40 years of this publication in our collection! Image 2 shows an advertisement for the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and image 3 is one for the Bulova Accutron, both from 1964 issues. The Fifty Fathoms is the watch preferred by “top athletes on high climbs or at great depths,” while the Accutron is of course “the only electronic watch in the world.” (As a note, please write in if you have corrections to any of these translations, since I’m personally not as much of a polyglot as our collection is!)
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Image 4 is a cover from February 1976, advertising Seiko. Interestingly, the watch indicators in the image show the day as both “Sun” for Sunday, in English, and “Dom” for Domingo, in Portuguese (conveniently spelled the same in Spanish). This points to a multilingual watch market in 1970s Brazil, in which wearers might prefer days in English, Portuguese, or another language. In image 5, a person’s hand, seemingly made out of titanium, advertises a titanium Omega Seamaster model available in 1983. This watch “comes from another world!” There’s some visual overlap between the space-age futurism of the Accutron and Seamaster advertisements. Being associated with outer space is eternally cool when it comes to watches–from the Speedmaster to the MoonSwatch.
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Portuguese literature, from either Brazil or Portugal, is not heavily represented at HSNY, though these aren’t our only Portuguese volumes. Unsurprisingly, among our books, English is the most common language, with about half of the collection made up of English language volumes. After that, it’s German, which also makes sense, given that the donor who built our collection, and who’s responsible for its incredible diversity, is a native German speaker – Fortunat Mueller-Maerki. German makes up about a quarter of the book collection, while French is slightly less, about a fifth. Nothing shocking so far: since much of the watchmaking industry continues to be based in Switzerland, many books by and about watchmakers are written in German and French.
I wish I had the space in this article to highlight books in every language in our collection, including our substantial holdings in Italian and Dutch. I don’t, so I’m just going to choose some that surprised or intrigued me, and you can come into the library for the rest. I was pleased to discover books in our collection in Catalan, Estonian, Indonesian, and Slovene. Our lone Catalan volume, “Els Rellotges Públics de Mallorca” by Josep Lluís Forteza Pomar, discusses public clocks in Mallorca, an island off Spain that uses a Catalan dialect as one of its languages.
A book written in the local language by a local author, in this case published by a local government council, helps researchers gain a more authentic understanding of the subject. Image 6, for example, shows a public clock in Mallorca that most tourists would probably overlook, since it adorns the façade of a care facility. The smaller inset photos, which include dates and measurements, show inaccessible details of the movement like the escapement and the control dial (with delicate Breguet hands).
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Several of our items in languages that are less common in the context of our collection help us to understand and visualize museum exhibitions or regional manufacturing histories. An article in Slovene illustrates a display of clocks in Ljubljana, the capital city. Clocks of the Ottoman empire are covered in Turkish. Books in Russian cover horological treasures of the Kremlin, while books in Japanese focus on both 20th-century military watches and Edo-period wadokei (two of which we currently have on display at HSNY). The gorgeous flower pot clock in image 7 comes from a book whose title translates to “Timepieces Collected by Qing Emperors in the Palace Museum.” According to the caption, it was made in about 1780 by Timothy Williamson in the UK, and includes multiple moving automata, including trembling petals.
A book in Romanian, by Volker Wollmann, covers “Pre-industrial and Industrial Heritage in Romania” and is our only volume about that country. Wollmann includes not only public clocks, but also lighthouses, fountains, wells, and other forms of public architecture.
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One of my favorite photos in the book shows a detail of seven allegorical figures from the famous 17th-century Sighișoara Clock Tower (image 8). Each figure represents not only a day of the week, but also an ancient god and a specific metal noted by an alchemical symbol. For instance, the first figure at top left, Monday, represents Artemis, with the moon symbol also denoting the metal silver.
Other books, of course, are simple translations or not topically related to the country in which the language is spoken, like a book about Junghans in Estonian, an elementary watchmaking textbook in Indonesian, or a book about chamber clocks in Croatian. It’s important to have these books in our library too–not every Danish speaker only wants to know about watchmaking in Denmark. Sometimes, if you’re an aspiring urmager, you just need to sit down with a thorough håndbog and get to work!
One result of my survey has been a new determination to expand our multilingual holdings. Our assistant librarian, St John Karp, an Esperanto enthusiast, has just acquired our first two books in that language. “La 13 Horloĝoj” (“The 13 Clocks”) is a translation of a strange fairy tale originally written by James Thurber, also in our library in English. “La Kalendaro tra la Tempo, tra la Spaco” (“The Calendar through Time, through Space”) was written in Esperanto by André Cherpillod. So, Esperantists unite! You will now be able to enjoy our library in your preferred tongue.
While English continues to be the most-used language for our patrons, we want to make sure we truly have something for everyone, and that means books and periodicals in many tongues. Curious about kellosepät? Doing a deep dive into dawne zegary? We hope you’ll use our resources, and leave our library with an enhanced appreciation of horology’s global reach and cross-cultural capacity.
Hodinkee