From “Cartographies of Time”

It’s only April, and my vote for the most beautiful book of the year may be all sewn up.

Slide Show ‘Cartographies of Time’ A selection of images from the book.

“Cartographies of Time,” published recently by Princeton Architectural Press, is an eye-popping record of the ways that mapmakers, chronologists, artists and other infographics geeks have tried to convey the passage of time visually. “What does history look like?” the coauthors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton write in their introduction. “How do you draw time?”

All of us are familiar with the old-fashioned timelines showing the march from antiquity to the industrial age, and Rosenberg and Grafton include some gorgeous examples. But they also dig up some far more mind-bending images, from Renaissance royal chronologies in the shape of bears to the 19th-century educator Emma Willard’s 3-D “Temple of Time” (above), which must have looked pretty trippy on the walls of her upstate New York girls’ school.

For a slideshow of images from “Cartographies of Time,” click here.