The Great Work in pictures: the emblem books, the twelve keys, the Ripley scrolls, and the signs the alchemists drew for the stone.
The sky as the old makers drew it: printed star atlases, the twelve signs, the planet gods enthroned, and the strange things reported overhead.
The whole of creation drawn as one machine: Fludd and Khunrath, Kircher's Egypt, the Rosicrucian plates, the Tree of Life and the gnostic schemes.
The working tools: John Dee's seals and angelic alphabet, the magic circle, the lodge pillars, and four centuries of tarot decks.
The old gods and the stories told about them: Egypt's dead, Greece and Rome, the north, the east, and the dream pictures the romantics made of all of it.
Scripture as the painters and cutters told it: the six days, the garden, the serpent and the exile, the saints, and the fall of Lucifer.
Books made by hand and by block: painted vellum leaves, the herbals, the printed chronicles and their monsters, and the emblems of death.
The engravers and etchers as makers: Durer and Schongauer, Rembrandt, Piranesi's prisons, Callot's soldiers, Dore's illustrated books, and all of Blake.
How antiquity was written down, and by whom: the survey plates, tomb and vase painting, old maps and city views, the forgers, and the scholars who caught them.