The first time I encountered a book of hours, I knew very little of art, and nothing of religion. I just looked at the book for what it was, and I indeed saw hours: the many hours someone had spent adorning it. Hence my first, faulty but deep-grounded association with the term: a book of hour condenses time into a surface. 

📷 detail of scroll / body-surface area, 17 x 1000 cm, (after the faux-marble wall of Ars Aemula Naturae), in progress