Is it just me, or is the watch world experiencing something of a Dava Sobel moment?
When the book Longitude was released in the mid-1990s, I had just started my first job in publishing and my journey to work involved a painful trip across London by tube from the cheap – but not so cheerful – East End to glamorous magazine-land in the West.
Those were the days before you could watch a film on a phone – in fact very few people even had mobiles – and the majority of my fellow commuters would avoid awkward eye-contact by reading newspapers or books.
There was always a mish-mash of reading material but occasionally (think Harry Potter, The Beach and Bridget Jones’s Diary) all the book jackets hiding faces formed a platoon of identical print soldiers. Dava Sobel’s wonderful Longitude was one of those tomes.
An unlikely hit, Longitude, unsurprisingly, told the story of John Harrison, the 18th-century watchmaker who solved the biggest navigation (and hence trade) problem of the time – how to determine longitude at sea.
What Ms Sobel had done was to take a previously dry and complex subject and inject it with the humanity and story-telling to make it accessible, understandable and interesting to everyone, regardless of age, scientific qualifications or previous appreciation of horology.
Last month, Longitude’s crown was passed to a new head with the publication of Rebecca Struthers’ The Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time (Hodder & Stoughton, £22).
No stranger to writing, Dr Struthers already has a PhD in horology and has penned many academic papers, but with her new book she has opened the often locked door of the watch world to everyone, giving a personal history of watches that spans centuries and continents and looks at the way timekeeping shapes every aspect of our lives and the society that we function in.
And while it is easy for me and the other watch nerds who were lucky enough to see advance copies to sing its praises, Hands of Time has in fact won universal respect gaining five-star reviews across the board from the Telegraph (in the literary section and not written by me), Observer and Spectator to Vogue, Esquire and Country Life.
The book is also due to be Radio 4’s Book of the Week from May 8 and has received testimonials from the likes of The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades and Stephen Fry.
While I’m sure most people will enjoy Dr Struthers’ book in the privacy of their own homes or via an easy-listening audio book, personally, I am hoping for an IT implosion – just for a short time – and a return to the London Underground book club where we can all hide behind a copy of Hands of Time and, just occasionally, give each other that knowing nod that says: ‘Horology? Yeah, we get it!’
