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“Imagine a time where pretty much any calculation you needed to make – how much you earn, the area of land on a map or some difficult astronomical equations – had to be worked out with quill pens and paper.

Doing sums like that would have been slow and tedious with lots of opportunities for mistakes to be made.

So there was something of a breakthrough 400 years ago when Scottish landowner and polymath John Napier produced a system of proportional numbers in tables that enabled an inquiring mind to solve complex arithmetic more quickly and with less potential for error.

After 20 years of work, the first labour-saving logarithm tables were born and notable astronomer Johannes Kepler – famous for his laws of planetary motion – adopted Napier’s ideas rapturously as they made his life so much easier and he was able to get much more done.

Unlike the well-thumbed log tables future generations of schoolchildren loved or loathed, the first edition of the book we have on loan from the Crawford Collection at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh is in pristine condition, which tells you something about what happened next.

For in just a few years, Napier’s pioneering volume became somewhat obsolete as mathematicians began to fine-tune his ideas. They were led by Henry Briggs of Gresham College in London who changed the original logarithms into the common (base 10) tables.

These seemed to work more satisfactorily and were subsequently ubiquitous in schools – not to mention many great feats of engineering – until the 1970s when electronic calculators became affordable.

Napier was a little ahead of the game in that respect, too. He wrote about calculating devices in his 1617 book Rabdologiæ seu Numerationis per Virgulas libri duo, which introduced the decimal point and influenced Charles Babbage’s first steps in computing.

Back in Napier’s time, of course, the dividing line between mathematics and other areas of study such as the occult, alchemy and necromancy was a little blurry to say the least and he wasn’t above taking advantage of his reputation as something of a warlock.

His father was a judge who had presided at the first witchcraft trials in Scotland so Napier would have been well aware of the lines he shouldn’t have crossed.

But that didn’t stop him from, among other things, keeping a black rooster as a spirit guide. On one occasion, believing that one of his servants was stealing from him, Napier sent all his staff into a room and told them each to lay their hands on the bird, which would then tell him the identity of the thief.

This was successful, however, because Napier had covered the rooster in soot and the servant whose guilt made him afraid to touch the bird would have been the only one to have emerged with clean hands.”