Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History

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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. An intric ate and personal history of watches and time from an extraordinary watchmaker and historian

In Hands of Time, watchmaker and historian Rebecca Struthers welcomes us into the hidden world of watchmaking, and to a history of time that spans centuries and continents. A personal history of timekeeping, unfortunately more focused on her own history than on the timekeeping mechanisms. Timepieces are one of humanity’s most ingenious innovations. Their invention was more significant for human culture than the printing press, or even the wheel. They have travelled the world with us, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest, and even to the Moon. They regulate our daily lives and have sculpted the social and economic development of society in surprising and dramatic ways.Today Struthers Watchmakers, based in a small studio in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, is celebrated around the world for its award-winning creations, as well as its dedication to promoting the painstaking craft of traditional watchmaking. (Rebecca is the first, and only, person in the UK to hold a PhD in watchmaking.) Hands of Time is an anthropology of human history through the lens of timekeeping/watches/horology. Anthropology is a subject I've only scraped the surface of in my studies so I was excited to give this book a go. Ripping the band-aid right off the bat: this is a decently dry book. I'm not talking about textbook style, but if you aren't at all interested in horology, this will be absolutely horrific to read. Hands of Time is smart, curious, digressive and brisk: an engaging survey through a period of intellectual history that reveals as much about people who wear watches as the objects on their wrists." — Wall Street Journal My book is] not just watches, it’s time. And that’s a really fascinating subject. It affects us all, every day. So I’m pairing [watches] with these wider stories. [For example] comparing Hans Wilsdorf to what Albert Einstein was doing, as the two men who revolutionised our relationship with time and the 20 th Century in two very different ways. And how these two concepts relate to each other.

A true joy… a work of staggering complexity and bewildering economy – highly deserving of the time you give it. ‘ Telegraph History can sneak up on you. For instance, I had no idea I would read a book about watchmaking this year. I am equally as surprised that I loved it. Throughout, I was reminded of Longitude by Dava Sobell, and Mudlark by Lara Maiklem. If you imagine the former but much longer and written by the latter, you'd have a fair idea of how this book reads. I loved both those books, so that's to be read as a strong recommendation from me.I really love objet d’art type watches. If I had the ability to make whatever I wanted, and didn’t have to worry about selling it, I’d go for something incredibly beautiful and decorative and ornate. And I’d include as many of [the] amazing crafts people [we work with] in as many different disciplines as possible. I have some ideas, actually. And that’s part of our 10-year plan. After 10 years of 248s we plan on not taking any more commissions and just making what we want to make. And then selling it when it’s done. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

This point of difference has been both a blessing and a curse – as the antiquarian horologist makes plain in her fantastic debut book Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time. Part-memoir, part-investigation into the history, art and science of watchmaking and a complete meditation on humankind’s relationship with time. How it has shaped our attitudes to work, to leisure, to trade and to mortality.My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Harper for an advance copy on this book about time, what we make of it, how we tell it, and what our knowledge of time tells about about us. Yeah. It went from not being able to get one person interested to a seven-way auction. So it worked out in the end. Now we’ve got the translations being sold at the moment. German, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Japanese.