#table book

Tender and intimate, the silverpoint portrait that Rembrandt made of Saskia – just two inches high, on the wipe-clean sheet of a table-book – evidently held a great significance.

Table-books appeared in Holland in about the 1520s, were first published in London fifty years later, and seem to have made it into the eighteenth century.

The next page has a handy guide to the four terms (Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter and Trinity) of England's legal year, during which courts would sit; another provides the times of sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstices.

Operating on the same principle as a wipe-clean table-book or wax tablet, the polyptych consisted of twelve fine ivory sheets, pinned together at one end so that they could fan open for temporary note-taking.

In one surviving example, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, a fold-out grid of figures sums any multiplication or division between any two numbers up to thirty. Perhaps surprisingly, all the numbers are shown in impractical Roman numerals, even though Arabic numerals had come to Europe hundreds of years before.*