Jeff-you did a terrific job describing the interplay between racing and Heuers. The book's images are powerful on their own, but I hadn't given a lot of thought to the supremacy of the watches until your review. In a recent issue of the Atlantic, there is a great article, "Is Google making us Stoopid," that notes how the invention of the clock changed people's thought patterns, as the internet is doing today. I think the pure connection between timing and racing back then created a comparatively short window--less than a generation--when a family of chronographs were manufactured that struck a perfect balance between legibility, functionality, and aesthetics.

As others have pointed out, the only negative about Arno's tour de force, is that it leaves us wanting more--more models, more details, more history. Who made the cases? Who were the designers? How were different variations of the same model worked out? What happened during the quartz overlap era?

After seeing an ad in the current GQ for a Speedmaster, I noted that Omega is still producing the watch virtually unchanged. The subdials, hands, and markers on the Speedie look almost identical to Heuers, which suggests that the original manufactureres are still around and producing these components. The new Monaco aside (what on earth is wrong with fluted pushers?!! Don't they realize that god is in the details??), it is strange that TAG-Heuer can't get the formula right and have a classics line.

As you know, I hope that the collecive knowledge of the Forum can take Arno's and your work to date and push forward to create a collecters reference manual that could be published as an open source document and updated frequently. We must have some CAD experts out there who have ideas about collaborating on a template that could be used for the MOAT reference models.

I did want to ask whether you deliberately wanted to note "hand-wound" towards he end of the article in contrast to the automatics.