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The Vault

Fiction & Essays from Vaulted Watch

ESSAY

The Ticker Tape

Grand Seiko just confirmed it's retiring the entire current Evolution 9 Hi-Beat "Birch" lineup this October, same movement, new bracelet and clasp, and a roughly 23% price jump at the register. That kind of running change usually tells you something about where the outgoing watches are headed on the secondary market. I break down the math in this week's issue.Also inside: • Seiko Group's stock is up 392% over the trailing twelve months on real revenue growth, not hype • Why Grand Seiko, King Seiko, and Credor are still almost invisible at the major Swiss auction houses, even in a record year for watch auctions overall • Naoya Hida's first chronograph, and a Kurono Tokyo piece that's already flipping near double retail.

ESSAY

Parallels

The SBGA283 is not a watch for the man who has conquered his past. Such men exist mainly in autobiographies written by liars. It is a watch for someone who has made peace with the evidence: the mistakes that cannot be revised, the ambitions that belonged to someone else and the earlier selves who did the best they could with limited information.

ESSAY

Fame is a Lousy Archivist

Two heavy brancards run the length of the watch. They could have been smooth, but they aren't. Somebody carved them into a repeating pattern of ridges and cuts. The silver catches light on the high spots and goes dark in the grooves. Fifty years of oxidation and wear have made the effect stronger than it started.  

ESSAY

The Scorecard

The outer scorecard is what everyone else thinks of your choices. The inner scorecard is whether you can live with them yourself. I ignored mine for a very long time.

ESSAY

The Borrowed Heart

The Holy Trinity is Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and you're meant to recite it the way you recite a creed — three names, no substitutions, no questions. So I'll ask one. What is Audemars Piguet doing in there?

ESSAY

The Third Omega

But here is what I actually want to tell you, and it has less to do with escapements than with time itself, the thing all of this is supposed to be about.

ESSAY

Pride and Joy

Louann was the only girl in a house full of brothers — wiry, grizzled men who looked like they’d been cut out of a cigarette ad. My great uncle Bud had the Marlboro Man’s mustache and his weathered skin, and any one of those men would just as soon whip your ass as pat you on the back. She came up in that house and came out of it tough as nails.

ESSAY

Somebody's Old Watch

Nobody climbed Everest with one. Nobody conquered space wearing one. It belongs to the vast anonymous middle of civilization—the people who actually keep the lights on.

ESSAY

Dead Reckoning

Everybody wants to talk about the Rolex. Fine. The GMT-Master is a beautiful object and it knows it — the way a certain kind of leading man knows it — and after a while all that self-possession curdles into a performance you've paid too much to sit through. The Seiko Navigator Timer doesn't perform. It works. That is the entire difference, and it is everything.

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