There is an unofficial subtitle to this book by Simon Garfield, how the world became obsessed with time. One can find it on the dust jacket, but it is hard to find and read, since it has blue text with a blue background. A summary says it is an “exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained, and saved time over the last 250 years.” This paragraph can be found at the book website, and some of this text is on page 4 of the book.

“Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.”

I had read most of this book several years ago, but I never blogged about it. I figured I should make sure I read the whole thing and blog about it this time, since I like reading about and thinking about the concept of time.

The book has some British terminology that not everyone knows. On page 13, the author goes to the hospital that “had its own routines and schedules. As did the A & E,” where he sat for a long time. What is A & E? I guess it means the Accident & Emergency room.

Page 21. The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. Looks like many other website confirm that.

Page 35. There is a French group called Fonacon that booed the new year in the transition from 2008 to 2009. “’We’re saying no to the tyranny of time, no to the merciless onslaught of the calendar, and yes to staying put in 2008,’ says a man who identifies himself as Marie-Gabriel, a militant member of the Fonacon group, which is organizing its fourth annual anti–New Year protest.”

Page 46. Start discussion of how the railways forced people to coordinate their clocks across the country of England. Page 52-53. On November 18, 1883, the US changed from having 49 time zones to just 4 in the contiguous 48 (or the 38 states in 1883) states.

Page 130. There is an IWC watch that will show the correct moon phase for the next 577 or so years. What happens then? It will be off a day, and you simply have to take it to an IWC boutique shop in the year 2602 (or so) to get it adjusted.

Page 137. This book, Technique and history of the Swiss watch from its beginnings to the present day, is mentioned. There are two editions of it. One from 1953, and one from 1970.

Page 205. There is a watch by Louis Moinet that has a dinosaur bone on the inside.

Page 213. “Although the majority of the [watch] brands were aimed at overachieving men, overachieving women were also welcomed with promotional baloney.”

On page 222, he mentions a supposedly famous slogan that I had never heard. It is “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” Huh? I guess — “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ was written by Terry Lovelock in 1973, when he was a copywriter at the Collett Dickenson Pearce ad agency. It was a golden time in British advertising, and CDP was at its peak: led by Frank Lowe the agency set a benchmark for creativity in ads.”

Pages 231-232. There are a bunch of time management book recommendations.

Page 243. If you wish to get up an hour or two earlier to start the day, you will also have to ask your servants to prepare your morning tea and breakfast an hour or two earlier than usual. So says Arnold Bennet in his 1910 book, How to live on twenty-four hours a day.

Page 307. A book by Hartmut Rose was mentioned. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. This roughly translates to [Social] Acceleration: The changing structures of time in modernity. The gist of the book is that “the more apps and computer programmes we download to streamline and order our lives, the more we feel like screaming.”

This passage from pages 316 to 317 hit home. “We struggle our whole lives to make enough money, to give enough love, to get the things we think are important, to do the things we think are important, to right some wrongs, to help others, to advance our understanding of the universe, to advance technology and the ease of living — and if we consider ourselves artists we try to create beauty and truth — and we try to do this all in the narrow time span available to us, and then every 100 years we’re all swept away and another bunch of people try to do the same. Time — and not even geologists deep time, just the time that comes after the time we have now — just keeps on rolling right along.” Yup, life is short, try to make the most of the time you have here in the universe.