Image courtesy of Department of Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, Harvard Art Museums © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeGeorg Brentel the Younger, from Pamphlet describing the construction and function of a conical sundial, Lauingen: Jacob Winter, 1615. Pamphlet with engravings and woodcuts.
These Photographs show seventeenth-century printed-paper sundials—the detailed engravings include instructions for building the finished products, created in this case by curators at the Sackler Museum. As Jennifer Carling and Jonathan Shaw point out in “Spheres of Knowledge,” from the November-December 2011 issue, sundials would have allowed traveling merchants not only to tell time, but also to convert among the three different time-telling systems of the day as they traveled from one region to another.