Horology Book Club suggestions?
I was recently recommended the book ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel. I’ve just started it, but generally it’s about how many advances in time keeping came from the need of sailors to be able to measure longitude.
I’ve never been much of a science guy so it’s been cool to learn simple info like that latitude is easy to measure just by looking at the angle of the north start in the sky (check mate flat earthers)
Anyhow, can anyone suggest other accessible books on watches or horology?
And if anyone wants to organize a book club, I’d probably come.
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Sitaramdas
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6.75” / 17.15 cm
Ah, that's another whole rabbit hole! Got a decent collection of horological books myself, but I'm at work.
Best/easiest way to go about it is to specialise - that is focus on what you are interested in & want to learn about - for example, I got the much praised "a man and his watch" that's almost obligatory to have in the background of any YouTube review and found it pretty boring tbh, but that's because it's stories about blokes and their timepieces. I'm not interested in people (ordinaryish ones anyway) so the book went way over my head. I'm far more interested in the technical side of the story so they're the types of book I focus on.
Most of mine come from eBay, and I recommend buy older books as there's some assumed knowledge on the part of the reader- modern books , even technical ones I find to be patronising and dumbed down unfortunately.
Good luck & happy hunting 👍🏻👍🏻
I agree with @Inkitatus, A Man and His Watch wasn't all that interesting. Horology by Barry Kaplan has been pretty good so far. Some of the catalogs I've requested give a decent amount of back story as well, Breguet being the best one. There's also this one on my list that has many positive reviews.
I agree with @Inkitatus, A Man and His Watch wasn't all that interesting. Horology by Barry Kaplan has been pretty good so far. Some of the catalogs I've requested give a decent amount of back story as well, Breguet being the best one. There's also this one on my list that has many positive reviews.
Ooo I'll have a look for that one myself, Cheers 👍
Also for watch repair I would recommend the Practical Watch Repair by Donald de Carle.
Also, if you are interested in repairing vintage watches, you can get these for free:
http://wadhome.org/~wad/horology/watches/reference/Joseph_Bulova_School_of_Watchmaking.pdf
https://rwg.cc/topic/157892-chicago-school-of-watchmaking-courses-e-book-uploaded-and-shared/
I found these useful, especially when trying to figure out how to use vintage tools.
If you are interested in watch stories, I would recommend The Great Complication by Stacy Perman. This one is about a watch competition between two American magnates, Henry Graves, Jr. and J.W. Packard.
As someone who has a massive collection of horological literature, I would say George Daniels book "Watchmaking" is a must have.
A great read, a small section on horology. But anything time related is discussed.