If talking about volvelles, planispheres and astrolabes makes your heart go pitter-patter, then Jessica Helfand's book, Reinventing the Wheel, is for you.

Even if you're not turned on by such talk, you'll enjoy this tour through the history of the wheel and how humans have learned to use it as a tool.

This remarkable and heavily illustrated book starts off simply enough, outlining the development of the wheel and its centrality in religious beliefs, including Christian--the nature of God is a circle, whose center is everywhere, its circumference no where, according to St. Augustine--Buddhist writings and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Helfand traces the use of the wheel through image and practical mathematics in both the secular and religious worlds, touching on Plato, Emerson, Pythagoras, Einstein and Hobbes, Solzhenitsyn and Dante.

She moves quickly through these esteemed men and their works--though not too quickly because she provides a tightly woven account of the wheel's importance and development as a scientific tool--and on to what I found the most interesting--illustrations of paper wheels used to measure or demonstrate practically everything from George Washington's biography to animal breeding seasons to semaphore signals.

This book reports on the myriad ways a simple device made of paper--or sometimes plastic--has been used to solve problems, remind people of key dates or bits of information and provide a method for handling complex projects.

In recent years, computerized publishing systems have eliminated the need for this device but I still use it occasionally. It is a handy and useful device; they store easily and have been known to double as newsroom Frisbees.

Most of the book consists of illustrations of some ways these calculator wheels were used. Helfand has tracked down wheels in collections at Yale, Princeton, the Beinecke Rare Book Library and elsewhere to remind us that what appears to be a simple tool can solve complex problems.

Of course, not all these wheels were terribly serious; here are some that were not:

The fortunescope: made in 1935, it promised to predict and advise; shock; thrill and surprise. It answered such questions as, "Is it wrong for me to do a little flirting?" to "What sort of legacy may I hope for?"

Holgate toy selector: made in 1952, this device matched up age and recommended appropriate toys.

Handwriting analysis: made in 1963, this wheel promised to "find children's aptitudes"; "detect dishonesty" and "select suitable mate" all based on handwriting style.

As you might expect, the wheels found all sorts of uses in war and sports.

Wheels were used to teach Morse Code, semaphore signals, aircraft, tank and ship identification, military rank and insignia, radiation detection and Soviet weapons.

Two of the odder military wheels (aside from the Wonder Bread Guide to U.S. Warships) are the 1940s DeKalb "What Your Corn Can Do to Win the War" which calculated by acreage the foodstuffs produced by corn, and the Israeli Marksmanship Wheel, produced in 1952 and uses wind angle and a table to figure inclination.

The stats-happy world of sports, would, of course, be heavily represented, and so we have the Batter's Pal, developed by former major leaguer Pete Runnels to quickly determine someone's batting average; the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics events calendar; and Arnold Palmer's "dial your problem" golf fixer, which "gives causes and corrections for all shots"; speaking of shots, there's the "Let's Go Hunting! Wheel" from Sears Roebuck, which identifies a variety of animals and recommends the weapon and ammunition best suited to kill them. It also includes such safety tips as "never mix gunpowder and alcohol" and "Never point a gun at anything you can't shoot."

Some of the other 80-plus wheels included in this book are:

Interesting Facts About Epidemic Diseases (1932)
The Norge Rollator Recipe Chart (1933)
The Prestolog Profitometer (1932)
The Quiz Wheel for Common Birds (1951)
M.F.A. Feeds Farm Calculator (1948)
The Little Star Tax Calculator (1946)
Sinclair's Family First Aid Remedy Wheel (1940s)

Volvelles, by the way, are explained by Michael Quinion at his World Wide Words site as historical calculation devices; you won't find the word in many dictionaries but clearly they continue under different names. A planisphere is an analog computer for calculating the positions of the stars; an astrolabe is an ancient astronomical computer designed to solve problems involving time and the position of the Sun and stars in the sky.