A Grand Complication: The Race to Build the World’s Most Legendary Watch

Buying, not building, is the focus of this breathless saga of watch collecting. Journalist Perman (In-N-Out Burger) profiles two rabid collectors of the early 20th century, auto magnate James Ward Packard and investor Henry Graves Jr., who both commissioned ever-fancier timepieces from Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe. (The endpoint, the Graves Supercomplication, featured 24 functions—“complications”—including a perpetual calendar, quarter-hourly chimes and a revolving star chart.) Perman’s portrait of the subculture of aggressive acquisitiveness gussies up her protagonists’ intrinsically sedate collecting pastime as a “duel,” toasts the “bravura” of their finicky tastes, and regales readers with auction-room melodramas complete with onlookers gasping at last-minute bids. The connoisseurship is a peg for her lavish celebration of the lifestyles of rich and fabulous collectors and their society weddings and ritzy surroundings: “The two men repaired to one of the public salons among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tapestries, arranging themselves on the gilt and brocade furniture, not far from where Queen Marie Antoinette had taken piano lessons.” Lost amid the luxe is Perman’s discussion of the watches themselves, which is too cursory to do justice to their ingenious mechanisms. Her lively account of watches as high-end consumer fetishes doesn’t quite show what makes them tick. Photos. Agent: Michelle Tessler. (Feb. 5)