Collecting Mechanical Watches

This passage mirrors many of my own thoughts on mechanical watches:

"Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.
Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss
watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake
of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're
pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely
because they require tending.
And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of
the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny
functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious
moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are,
in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond,
Tamagotchi-like, to "love," in the form, usually, of the expensive
ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors
or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly
restored from virtually any stage of ruin."

William Gibson
Science fiction author


Read the whole thing here: "My Obsession"

1st Post

Why collect Russian/Soviet watches?

I guess the larger question is why collect anything? However, that is a question beyond the scope of this post.

After a lifetime of seeing watches as simply tools to tell time, I became interested in mechanical watches after receiving an automatic watch as a gift from my wife. It originally belonged to her father who bought it in Afghanistan while he was working there as an engineer in the last days of the Soviet/Afghan conflict. As I learned more about the watch I became fascinated by the precision mechanics of telling time and the unique evolution of the Soviet watch industry.

These Soviet/Russian pieces evoke a feeling of the time of the USSR and of a production and engineering philosophy unique in the world. Fortunately for the collector they are still relatively inexpensive and it's fairly easy to put together a modest collection that tells the story of Soviet/Russian horology.