Book Review: MB&F; – The First Fifteen Years
MB&F; – The First Fifteen Years. By Suzanne Wong and William Massena. La Martinière/Abrams; CHF198 for M.A.D. Gallery edition; US$170 for standard edition. To celebrate its 15 years – from 2005 to 2020 – of making extraordinary watches, MB&F; commissioned a 312-page book, MB&F; – The First Fifteen Years. In its short foreword, MB&F; founder Maximilian Büsser states he did not want a biography since they are “only written at the end of a journey”. Instead, he puts forward the rhetorical question: developing 18 calibres for over 160 products over the period “deserves to be documented, right?” He adds “hundreds of artisans, engineers and watchmakers” came along for the ride and “this is the story I love to tell”. He describes the tome as a catalogue raisonné, adding that it is something “never been done for a watch brand; a world first in the watchmaking industry!” Defined by the New York Public Library, a catalogue raisonné in the visual arts serves as an important tool not just to establish an artist’s oeuvre, and thus record history, but also to aid in authentication by cataloguing all the known works of an artist. The New York Public Library also adds “Essay(s) on the artist” and “Critical assessments and remarks” as desirable content in such a publication. All the watches and all the friends The main part of the book is such a catalogue of 254 pages, divided into three sections: “Horological Machines”, “Legacy Machines”, ...
Time+Tide
