This book illuminates the craftsmanship and ingenuity of contemporary watchmaking. The advent of quartz technology had a huge effect on traditional watchmaking. In Switzerland, in the 1970s, tens of thousands lost their jobs in the watch industry, and for a time it looked as if a 500-year-long tradition of skills would be lost forever. Today, against the odds, artist craftsmen have triumphantly brought about the renaissance of the mechanical handmade watch.
The aesthetic agenda is being set by a group of remarkable independents. This book tells their story, and it is beautifully illustrated with hundreds of examples of their virtuoso work.
Here is George Daniels, who systematically set out to surpass the skills of the most celebrated watchmaker of all time, Abraham Louis Breguet. Daniels, the world’s most renowned watchmaker, has even improved upon those eighteenth-century skills by inventing a lever escapement requiring no lubrication. Svend Andersen (Denmark), Vincent Calabrese (Italy), Alain Silberstein and Vianney Halter (France), Aniceto Jiménez Pita (Spain), Marco Lang (Germany), Philippe Dufour, Antoine Preziuso, and Franck Muller (Switzerland), and Roger Smith (England) are among the other participants. In addition to the major interviews, other craftsmen and workshops from Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland, Finland, Ireland, and Hungary are introduced and illustrated.Using many photographs, it offers a retrospective exhibition of the watches of George Daniels, Svend Andersen, Vincent Calabrese, Philippe Dufour, Antoine Preziuso, Franck Muller, Aniceto Jiménez Pita, Alain Silberstein, Marco Lang, Vianney Halter and Roger Smith. In addition to the eleven major interviews, additional craftsmen and workshops from Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland, Finland, Ireland and Hungary are introduced and illustrated. Also included are a technical glossary, suggestions for further reading, and a list of specialist websites and magazines.
Is a watch ever a work of art? Is a watchmaker ever an artist? To answer these questions and many more, Michael Clerizo spent months listening to eleven of the world's most renowned watchmakers. From the Isle of Man to the Left Bank of the Seine, from Barcelona to Dresden, from the Jura Mountains to Lake Geneva, these extraordinary individuals told their stories. We hear of lives heavily laced with setbacks but sustained by an all conquering passion and suffused with the sweet satisfaction of mastering the skills of mechanical watchmaking, and crowned with the invigorating success of finding others willing to buy and treasure their work. Few books have such a safe, captive and targeted audience as this one; and few are so revealing of the supreme heights of ingenuity and perfection that exist in a high-tech era.
About the author
Michael Clerizo is a London-based American journalist noted for his in-depth analysis of bespoke luxury products for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Robb Report and specialist watch and other magazines.
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