Watches of the Paul Chamberlain Collection : 2009 NAWCC National Convention Exhibit, Grand Rapids, Michigan / developed by Terry Casey, designed and produced by the NAWCC Publications Department.

The items presented here were most graciously provided by the Michigan State University Museum for this exhibit. The descriptions of the items, drawings, and early photographs are from: Watches: The Paul M. Chamberlain collection at the Art Insititute of Chicago, a catalog produced by the Art Institute of Chicago, 1921.

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BOOKREVIEW Paul Chamberlain's Watch Collection documented Watches of the Paul Chamberlain Collection - 2009 NAWCC National Convention Exhibit, Grand Rapids, Michigan, by NAWCC Publications Staff, Terry Casey (Introduction) and Dennis Engels (Photography). Published 2009 by NAWCC, Columbia PA (http://www.nawccstore.org); saddle stapled, 36 pages, 22x28 cm; No ISBN; heavily illustrated (16 color and 134 black and white photographs, plus escapement diagrams). Text in English. Available at the publisher's website, for US plus postage, or borrow from the Library and Research Center at the National Watch and Clock Museum. Paul Mellen Chamberlain, the eminent horological author and scholar, assembled two major watch collections during his lifetime. In the few years just before World War I, this engineer hailing from a prominent Michigan family, quietly put together a collection of around 300 pocket watches with unusual and innovative features, many of them made by the luminaries of horological history including Tompion, Graham, LeRoy, Berthoud and Breguet. Not only were the watches remarkable, but so was the fact that he assembled the collection in such a short time. In 1917, when Chamberlain expected to be deployed to the war zone in France, he donated the collection to the Chamberlain Memorial Museum in Three Oaks, MI. By the time the military discharged him in 1920, Chamberlain was exhausted. He had served stateside in a stressful position coordinating ordinance issues throughout the Midwest, and his wife had died. For relief, Chamberlain once again turned to horology, and arranged for 292 watches of his first collection to be publicly exhibited in 1921 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The published 64 page catalog produced at that time briefly describes each watch (the texts though unattributed are presumably by Chamberlain himself and is an underappreciated treasure among horological publications. When the Chamberlain Museum closed in 1952, its entire contents were transferred to the Michigan State University Museum, where only a few of the Chamberlain watches were ever officially exhibited (furthermore, about a dozen of them were shown at the Smithsonian as part of a loan for several years in the 1960s). Many years ago, the Museum also reported the watches as stolen, and they have ever since figured prominently on the international lists of stolen horological artifacts. A short time ago, however, the community of horological scholars discovered that at least a good portion of the collection had been quickly recovered and had been stored away in the Museum vaults in recent decades. The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors used the occasion of its 64th Convention in nearby Grand Rapids, Michigan in June 2009, to arrange for a short duration temporary public exhibit of 44 of the watches. This is the first time they have been exhibited in many decades. For this occasion, Dennis Engels, a local photographer took new photographs, and former NAWCC Bulletin editor Terry Casey, with the help of the NAWCC publications department, produced the small booklet under review. The publication reuses the descriptive texts from the 1921 catalogue, and enhances them with new color and black and white photographs, as well as a few historic diagrams of some of the more unusual escapements. The resulting booklet is a most reasonably priced, 'must-have' addition to the horological library of any enthusiast of 'technical' rarities among pocket watches. The publication is no glossy coffee table book, but a low-key and welcome addition to the horological reference literature. During the exhibit at the Convention in Grand Rapids there was much discussion about the current 'state of the watches'. As also shown in the newly published catalog, at some time between 1952 and the present, the MSU Museum prominently marked each watch with scratched inscriptions on their plates with 'MSU' and an inventory number. Whoever did this must have been a 'fine arts' curator, following the museum practice of permanently marking artifacts in an 'inconspicuous place'. Horological scholars however are rightfully outraged by this 'desecration'. For a collection telling the technical history of horology the plates are NOT an 'inconspicuous place', but are the center of attention of the object, equivalent to the surface of an oil painting. For the record it is worth noting that soon after the 1921 exhibit at the Art Institute, Chamberlain moved to New York, where he took up a 'bohemian lifestyle', traveled extensively in Europe, became a prolific horological writer, and eventually remarried. He also started a much more extensive second horological collection, which grew to about 1500 pieces. Just before Chamberlain died, he had started to dispose of that collection. There is reason to believe he wanted most of it to be in museums in order to facilitate horological scholarship (his marine chronometers mostly went to the Mariners Museum in Newport News. VA). His death short-circuited those plans, and most of the second collection was sold piecemeal over the decades by his widow (including some pieces alleged to have been on loan to Chamberlain at the time of his death, creating some troublesome provenance cases that are unresolved to this day). Historians of horology should be delighted about the news that at least a sizable portion of the first Chamberlain collection has survived intact, and will be available for scholarship once again. The collection still has much to tell about technical horology, and the great collector who assembled it. That the pieces are no longer in the location - and certainly no longer in the pristine state that Chamberlain had intended for them - is unfortunate. MSU deserves credit for allowing some of them to be exhibited publicly again, and the NAWCC is to be commended for quickly making a record of these 44 watches available. Hopefully, the publication under review is but a teaser for a more comprehensive and more scholarly publication to come, with photographs by a specialist in horological imaging and a text that maybe combines Chamberlain's description with a present-day critical examination on where these examples fit into the progress of horological technology through the ages. Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, Sussex, New Jersey June 13, 2009