What did Pepys do after buying Micrographia in 1665?

Sat up until two in the morning reading it, and wrote in his diary that it was the most ingenious book he had ever read in his life. He had bought it the same month he first recorded seeing plague deaths in London, which gives some sense of what a distraction it must have been.

Micrographia was the first scientific bestseller, and the reason was the pictures. Hooke drew enormous fold-out engravings from his own observations - a flea rendered a foot long, a louse gripping a human hair, the compound eye of a fly - and readers who had never seen through a lens were shown that ordinary things had structure at a scale nobody had suspected. The word cell appears in it for the first time, describing the compartments in a slice of cork.

Pepys is a useful witness to the period generally, because he wrote down everything with no expectation of being read - the diary is in shorthand and includes his affairs, his bowels, his bribes and his terror. He was present for the plague and the Great Fire, buried his wine and a parmesan cheese in the garden to save them from the flames, and later reformed the Royal Navy's administration so thoroughly that he is arguably its most consequential civil servant.