Garfield, Timekeepers

Another in my series of off topic posts, this one, in the interest of time (yours and mine), very brief.

Simon Garfield is a prolific British author and journalist who has written about an assortment of things, from fonts to war diaries to the color mauve. Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time (Canongate, 2016) is something of a hodgepodge itself, with essays on watchmaking, photography, Roger Bannister, production lines, Poundbury (“another of [Prince Charles’s] bright ideas”), music recording, and filibusters. Which I suppose “leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives.”

Timekeepers is a lightweight, disappointing book. But I chuckled over a cartoon and learned “how the French messed up the calendar.” So I’ll share the cartoon and, feeling lazy, simply give a link to the Wikipedia article on the French Republican calendar.