I was flipping through the 2010 Wristwatch Annual and found a wristwatch with a price of just over a million dollars. It’s called a Cat’s Eye Haute Joaillerie and made by the Girard-Perregaux watch company. There is something reassuring about a world in which a million dollar wristwatch exists.
My current watch hangs from an aluminum carabiner and cost a bit less than a million dollars-about $15 as I recall-at Wal-Mart. This does not mean that I don’t have plans for owning a very expensive wristwatch one of these days. I have a great fondness for the look of Hublot, Graham, Greubel Forsey, and Jacob & Co watches. A lot of these watches are call Tourbillon, which must have something to with how much money you need to own one.
I spend a lot of time roaming the halls of my local libraries, The Irving Public Library ranks among my favorites, though The Fort Worth Library is also very good. Irving seems to always have recent stuff on their shelves. Recent release DVDs are common and the occasional oddity like The 2010 Wristwatch Annual.
Here is a book I would not expect to find in a library, as it is basically a catalog of watch makers the average person has never heard of, and even readers of the Robb Report might not recognize. I do like the countless photographs of space age, steam punk, and totally incomprehensible watches. Some of the makers of these $1,00-$1,000,000 dollar watches seem to pride themselves on making a watch that doesn’t, in any noticeable way, tell what time it is.
Romain Jerome’s watches look like they would be at home in a Mad Max film, while the watches of Daniel Roth have a more Harry Potter feel to them. I was surprised to find that Rolex’s most expense model was a mere $33,650. There is also a couple of pages of Seiko watches-I’ve never thought of Seiko as being in exactly the same class as Rolex or TAG Heuer.
It’s fun to riffle the pages of the wristwatch annual, in the same it is fun to look at yachts and private jets-these are toys for others to play with. Even if I had the billions to spent, I can’t image blowing them all on wristwatches. Well, maybe just one of the steam punk models from Montblanc. . .
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