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| The captions for these photos are on the previous page despite room for them on this spread. |
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| A quote, a small column of type and a colour Omega ad, an incredibly weak spread. |
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| Left An example of bizarre cropping of watch photos. |
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| The watch list is on the previous page when it should have been on this spread. |
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| Design whimsy cropping of these watches. |
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| Quotation marks on the type but who said it? Visually, a very bland spread. |
Depending on how this Compendium sells, there could be future volumes; it's numbered as 01, and I assume the contents have been taken from past issues of Ward's Loupe magazine. The author, Ken Kessler, writes in an easy, conversational style about the watch business, but from a fan and collector's point of view, rather than an academic study of the world's high-end timepiece manufacturers over the decades.
The contents have something for every watch fan: Modern watch culture; General watch topics; Buying and collecting; People related. I enjoyed a couple of pieces: Useless Awards and Character Watches. At least 1200 to collect, from Betty Boop to Wonder Woman and especially dozens featuring Micky Mouse on the dial, with his arms indicating the time
The words are interesting but visually the book is a mess, lacking any editorial oversight. The format is design whimsy with no real regard for the reader. There are plenty of examples of this. Picture captions appear on a spread before the following page with the pictures, despite there being plenty of blank space on the image spreads. Pages 104 and 105 have a photo of twelve military watches displayed in a box; white space is on either side of the photo, the ideal place for the caption but they are on the previous page and not in the same order as in the photo. Throughout the book, because the text doesn't really equal the number of pages so empty page space is filled with plenty of quotes with no attribution (set in a thirty-five-point Futura style face). Lots of watch photos seem to be regarded as graphic shapes with bits of a timepiece cropped for no reason. Fortunately, there are some page-size colour photos of Photoshopped or AI-generated close-ups of watch works and these look quite spectacular.
Watches are fascinating but the look of the book is hopelessly out of step with Ken Kessler's interesting words.
