Experience
The Imperfect Engraving
A circular pattern found during a dull meeting, a rectangular caseback it had no business fitting, and the small unfinished patch a friend noticed a month later.
The Chocolate Reverso
When I ordered my Chocolate Reverso, I was given the option of having the reverse engraved. I didn’t immediately know what I wanted. I only knew that if I was going to engrave it, I wanted the watch to become mine in a way that another example never could. At the time, I was also waiting for my Roger Smith Series 2. Roger had previously sent me photographs of its dial, and somewhere in my memory I carried an impression of its pattern. I thought it would be wonderful if the engraving on the Reverso somehow echoed the Smith.
Then, during a particularly uninteresting meeting at work, my mind began to wander. I started searching online for patterns and came across a fleur-de-lis design that immediately caught my attention. There was one problem: the pattern was circular, while the back of a Reverso was unmistakably rectangular. “Let’s send it to Switzerland and see what the engravers think,” JLC crew suggested. Within several weeks the watch arrived, I turned it over and there it was. The engraver had taken the circular design I had found during that boring meeting and reimagined it perfectly for the rectangular Reverso case. It was intricate, balanced and beautifully executed. I loved it!
About a month later, I proudly showed the watch to a friend. We admired the engraving together until he noticed something I hadn’t. A small section wasn’t finished. Part of the stippling that appeared throughout the pattern was simply missing, and I wasn’t able to unsee it anymore. So my newly personalized Reverso made another journey, back to Switzerland. Thankfully, it returned quickly, this time with the engraving complete. Perhaps that little imperfection has become part of the story, because when it was finally finished, there could be no other Chocolate Reverso quite like mine.
About Mitch & Linda Katz
For Mitch Katz and his wife Linda, watches have never been simply objects to collect. They have become part of a life together, connected to friendships, travels, accidents, laughter, personal milestones, and the people they have met along the way. That same belief, that the real value of a watch lies in the stories surrounding it, also led Mitch to write Time on My Hands: A Collector’s Journey in the World of Watches, his memoir about the watches, people, and experiences that shaped his collecting life. He has since carried his love of horology into fiction with Time Eternal, the first in a series of mysteries set within the world of watches, with three further novels in development. Together, these ten watches tell something larger than the story of a collection: the story of Mitch and Linda, and of how, over time, watches became part of the memories they share.