Recommended Reading: An Incomplete List Of Watch Resources For Readers And Collectors
There are seemingly more places to read about watches and watch collecting now than ever before in human history. Here’s one watch writer’s sample of go-to resources.
Whenever I talk to anyone about watches and watchmaking, sooner or later I get around to talking about what it was like in the Good (or maybe not so good) Old Days, when I was just getting interested in watches and resources were fewer and further between than they are now. I usually start out by talking about how much more difficult it was to find information, and then almost invariably I say something like this:
“When I first got interested in watches, there was almost no internet to speak of and the magazines, such as they were, were on the bottom back shelves of the magazine racks, next to the model railroading and doll collecting magazines.”
I mentioned those two other hobbies not as a slight, but as examples of how unusual and relatively obscure the hobby of watch collecting used to be. It has now become such a global phenomenon that I cannot remember the last time anybody described it as a “hobby,” which seems about as apt as calling collecting Abstract Expressionist paintings, or cases of vintage Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a “hobby,” – it seems more like the kind of word you should use for, well, model railroading and doll collecting. It is however largely true that such resources there were, were in print, and of course, there was, starting around the mid-1990s, Usenet Newsgroups, on one of which I had my first arguments about watches.
Today we are so awash in resources that it’s hard to know where to start. For collectors interested in the subtleties of market prices, and in trading and comparing notes on auctions and other places to sell and buy, much of the action now takes place in private chats on WhatsApp and other instant and direct messaging platforms. However, for someone who wants to find out more about the history of watchmaking, or who invented what when, it has not necessarily gotten a whole lot easier than it was in the mid-1990s, when it was all about highly niche periodicals, library archives, and densely written auction catalogs.
Whenever I start researching a subject, I have a few resources I use more often than not, and there are some books as well which I have found to be valuable on repeat. Here’s a necessarily incomplete list of where I start looking when I’m looking for something.
The European Patent Database
This isn’t necessarily the most glamorous place to dig around, and you have to have decent keyword selection skills and some patience, depending on what you’re looking for, but for patents coming from European filers, this is your one stop shop. I’ve used espace.net for researching everything from who invented the spring bar to the origins of the Girard Perregaux Constant Escapement, to, more recently, the evolution of the magnetic escapement at Breguet. If you’re so inclined, it’s also an entertaining place to just browse for wild horological ideas which may or may not ever see the light of day – some of the biggest names in the business have made a cottage industry out of patenting fascinating ideas, just in case or maybe just for the hell of it.
Potential Gotchas To Look Out For: if you’re looking for an explanation of how a new complication, escapement, or other mechanism works, it’s worth bearing in mind that there can be a considerable difference between the basic innovation covered by the patent, and the final execution released to the public. It also helps if you are the kind of person who doesn’t mind counting teeth to figure out what a wheel in a calendar complication does (for instance).
Technical Tours De Force: Watches By SJX
Watches by SJX has been around for many years and their coverage is matter-of-fact, largely free of hypberbole, and usually, very valuably, painstakingly correct. If I’m looking for a piece of comprehensive coverage, of anything from the structure and function of a new complication, to a list of the known whereabouts of Breguet’s Sympathique clocks, this is usually among the first two or three places I look.
Potential Gotchas To Look Out For: SJX’s writers do not shy away from densely packed technical analyses, and bear in mind that sometimes, you might run across something that will take time and work to digest. This may, depending on your disposition, be a feature, rather than a bug, but beware; this isn’t “Top Ten Best New Green Dialed Watches To Brighten Your Spring” territory, and there is occasionally a presumption of prior knowledge that may test yours. It doesn’t happen very often but every now and then you’re going to wish you’d paid more attention in calculus.
A Sultan Of (Watch) Substacks: The Deep Psycho-Economic Musings Of ScrewDownCrown
As the world of publishing goes, so goes watch publishing and the latest phenom is the world of Substacks – the email platform turned web publishing platform turned would-be-latest-social-interaction-platform-as-of-their-$100-million-series-C-round in 2025 – and it is where you will find what so many say they are looking for: well informed and unfiltered takes from folks who are really in the trenches, either as journalists or collectors or both. For something you will struggle to find elsewhere, may I recommend taking a gander at the deep dives at Screwdowncrown.com, where the enigmatic but verbose Kingflum reigns over his hidden realm.
KF is by day a professional in the energy industry, but by night … well, he doesn’t exactly dress up like a bat and beat up malefactors, but he does publish some of the most detailed analyses of collector behavior, as well as incredibly granular market takes, that ever man constructed behind a paywall. Hell, I don’t know; maybe he dresses up like a bat while doing it. Yes, subscriber only, but worth it.
Potential gotcha: When I Said Verbose, I Meant Verbose. If you’re looking for a fast fresh take on the latest news, broken up into single sentence paragraphs for ease of reading on mobile in the length of time it takes you to down your first espresso (I hear that’s all the rage these days) SDC may not be for you. KF’s stories are pretty uniformly very deep dives, but you know what? Nobody can say he doesn’t deliver – often – and for paywalled watch content, at least in terms of average price per word, it’s hard to think of a better value proposition.
For People Who Want To Know What ‘Handmade’ Really Means: ‘Watchmaking’ by George Daniels.
This is it: the magnum opus of a man widely regarded as one of the key figures in the evolution of modern mechanical horology; the man who derisively called makers of quartz watches, “the electricians,” the working manual of the boy from an impoverished background who grew up eating dripping on toast and ended up with taste for vintage Bentleys – and, of course, the man who gave us the co-axial escapement. ‘Watchmaking,’ is, as they say, just what it says on the tin: a soup to nuts introduction on how to make a watch by hand, from tooth counts on train wheels, to the arcane intricacies of escapement geometry (the section on different types of escapements alone is more than worth the price of entry) to making balances, turning staffs, the basics of lathe and file work, heat-tempering, and a whole lot more.
Despite the technical nature of the book, Daniels’ dry wit comes through often such as when he remarks of Ferdinand Berthoud, “Certainly, he had a very high opinion of his own work.” (Of course, so did Daniels – have a high opinion of his own work, I mean – but it is hard to argue that he wasn’t right). Moreover, it’s indispensable to anyone who wants context for the work of his rightly famed apprentice, Roger Smith. If you want to write about watches I have two pieces of advice: learn French, and buy this book. I have a daily driver copy with a broken spine, and two backups. You can’t be too careful.
Potential Gotchas: Honestly, I can’t think of any. This is obviously a book on technical watchmaking and that’s clear as day going in; I don’t think anyone who is interested in how to get a break on the latest hype watch, or who wants the advance skinny on the latest low-number limited edition, is going to mistake ‘Watchmaking’ for anything other than what it is. I think this is a vastly entertaining and endlessly absorbing book, albeit I’m also the only person I know who’s read ‘Ulysses’ three times. For fun. (I cannot get through ‘Infinite Jest,’ though, and it’s not for lack of trying.)
Historical Surveys Spanning Decades: Revolution.
Revolution has been around for many years (I should know, I was the magazine’s first US editor in chief) and its technical and historical coverage are class leading for a number of reasons. First of all, founder Wei Koh and others there have produced a number of genuinely valuable and comprehensive histories of some of the most important models from some of the world’s most renowned brands. If I’m looking for a history of Patek perpetual calendar wristwatches (for instance) pretty early on, I generally add “Revolution” to the search terms and more often than not, something like Wei Koh’s 2019 ‘The Entire History Of Patek Philippe’s Perpetual Calendars,’
On top of that, you can also get really terrific technical coverage from Cheryl Chia, who is almost alone among working watch technical writers in her ability to see through the press release and understand how a new complication really works – and, moreover, to explain it in a way that doesn’t presuppose you have a degree in micromechanical engineering; her coverage of the Audemars Piguet 150th Anniversary lunisolar calendar pocket watch is a perfect case in point, showcasing her ability to make something as inherently complicated as a lunisolar calendar understandable.
Potential Gotchas: Occasional Stretches Of Purple Prose. I write this knowing Wei is probably going to read it, but first of all, I think he’s immune to getting depressed by criticism; second, I’ve said it to him often over the years; and third, I think there is plenty of reason to think he’s doing it on purpose. This is another one of those things where there’s ample evidence it’s a feature, not a bug, and besides, sometimes I find his verbal inventiveness irresistible. Many, many years ago, he used the phrase “ursine heft” to describe an Hublot, which is not phrase you will find at SJX (or, really, anywhere else) and I found it so hilarious, I deliberately steal it from him at least twice a year. There wasn’t any writing like that when the magazines were bottom back, next to the model railroading and doll collecting magazines, I tell you what.
Coda: Things I Think We Should Do More Often.
The only thing I have done more than type stories (thousands to date, I lost count long ago) is read them and I have noticed a couple of things.
The first is that watch writers sometimes seem to have an allergy to dates; they are often not mentioned in general coverage when they should be in order to provide context. Look, I’ve fudged things, god knows; I know when the clock’s ticking it’s tempting to say “during the Art Deco era” or “in that period of optimism after the Great War,” or what have you, instead of spending time digging and then writing, “as far as I know, in or around 1926.” But every time I do it I know I’m cheating and that I’m banking on someone not noticing.
The second is an apparent disinclination to say when you don’t know something. Nobody knows everything, and some facts or alleged facts can be very hard to pin down, especially if you have a healthy distrust of the veracity of press releases, which are not necessarily written with a view to ensuring that every statement of apparent fact has two independent sources. “As far as I know,” is a phrase too seldom used; a victim of the understandable but undermining desire to be seen as an expert. This is not to say that wanting to be seen as an expert is not a near-universal failing among watch writers, among which I include myself. Long ago, someone new to the scene introduced themselves to me by saying, “I’m the world’s most important watch writer,” and, and I take no pride in admitting this, the first thing that popped into my head was, “Heyyyyy … that job is taken.”
The third, is a failure to cite sources. Of the three, this is the most obviously preventable as well as the most inexplicable. Nobody owns facts. This sort of thing is akin to the motivation behind not wanting to say you don’t know something; it makes you the gatekeeper and gives you the chance to disparage other people’s deplorable ignorance of the delicious secrets to which you alone are privy, but it accomplishes nothing. I guarantee you, if you’ve come up with an interesting fact in the course of researching a story, the only thing you’re doing by not saying where you got it, is making it harder for like-minded colleagues to give you the compliment of citing your work and your sources in turn. Plus if it’s a fact that’s out there in a publicly available source, it usually takes minutes for someone else to find it. Plus it dumbs down the whole enterprise of watch writing.
And it’s dishonest.You want to know what the odds are of someone finding a detailed historical note in an auction catalog and then passing it off as their own research, without attribution? Not zero, my friend, not zero.
A last word on brand books: there are some very good ones, and there are some that are little more than page after page of blown up catalog photos with the information content of a bubble gum wrapper. As a martial arts teacher of mine once said of pretty but poorly forged swords that look great on a wall but that you wouldn’t use to subdue a gerbil, a pretty face may hide a perfidious heart. Look before you buy, is this aging retro-grouch’s advice. Happy reading!