A Terrible Typeface on an Expensive Watch
This is the Patek Philippe 5131. It’s a world-timer with an intricate and lovely, hand-painted cloisonné enamel dial, and is a marvel of engineering and ingenuity from one of the Holy Trinity of watchmaking that will set you back at least $150,000 if you’re lucky1.
It also features one of the shittiest choices of typeface I’ve seen on a watch of its calibre (heh).
I wonder what the design process was at this august company when it came to this watch’s dial. It would appear that someone at Patek opened up Microsoft Word under “whooshing deadline” duress and, at the last minute, just said fuck it and picked the easy classy majesty that is the SHOUTING VARIANT of Lucida Calligraphy. The overall effect is one where you wonder if you’re looking at a bloody knockoff.
I like to imagine they received feedback over this ‘bold’ choice since here’s the next version, the 5231, on the right with its utterly ghastly older brother on the left.
Source: Revolution Watch
I got that picture from this exhaustive history of Patek’s World Timers. It’s well-researched, has a lot of pictures, and is a good read if you can withstand and forgive sentences like this written by the same bro who will definitely not teach you anything about after-dinner drinks.
As if, somehow, by losing myself in the beautifully rendered map of the Americas, Africa and Europe, I could remember how interconnected this world once was and hopefully will be again. So, I began to see my World Timer as a chalice of renewed hope to once more live the glorious opiatic maelstrom of transcontinental travel, even if for the time being this is limited only to my imagination as I write these words.
Cool man.
If you’re new to the world of watches, this is a very reasonable price for a piece like this. Consider this Rafa Nadal-endorsed Richard Mille (RM 27-04) that costs well over $2.5M (here’s why). It is, again, a legit wonder of engineering/watchmaking. Accuracy is another story: as far as time-telling goes, the absolute legend, the GOAT that is the Casio F91W ($10 or less) than any Patek or Mille you can buy. It will withstand “12,000 g’s” and last more than a decade on its battery. I maintain that this is what a watch-lover should start their collection with (followed by a Hamilton but that’s another rant).↩︎