Watch and Clock Brand Catalogs Collection, 1852-2019.

Access is open for research use.

The Watch and Clock Brand Catalogs Collection consists of catalogs issued by individual clock- and watchmaking companies advertising their products for a certain time period (usually a year, a season, or a month). These works were produced with the intent of advertising products for sale, both to individuals and to retailers, and accordingly depict watch and clock designs, prices, and technical information as well as advertising material like staged photography, illustrations, and written copy.

This collection includes both original and facsimile catalogs. Original catalogs exist in diverse formats and may be in the form of perfect-bound or saddle-stitched books or booklets, pamphlets, or folded leaflets and may be either color-printed or monochromatic. The format, size and style of the catalogs varies greatly across time, location, brand, and target audience. Some may be comparable in size and expense to a published book, whereas others may be a single sheet folded to a 6 inch square. The original catalogs mostly cover 1950 to present, with earlier catalogs existing only in facsimile form, but the collection does include some originals from the early 20th century.

Some of the facsimile catalogs were issued as physical facsimiles designed to reproduce the size, binding, and typesetting of the original. Others exist as printouts of digital scans. The majority of the collection's holdings dated prior to 1901 are in facsimile form, and the facsimile editions are almost exclusively for catalogs dating from 1852 to 1901. Catalogs from this period varied in design but are largely similar in format as saddle-stitched booklets under 10 inches tall. They were designed to be ephemeral and, as such, can be as small as 4.5 inches tall. Predating readily accessible color-printing, they are printed in exclusively black ink - though some feature a cover printed on color paper or card - and their primary decorative elements are typographical and engraved images of the products.

The printed digital facsimiles come from a variety of sources - some were provided directly to Fortunat Mueller-Maerki by other libraries and institutions and are identified as such in their title pages, some were sourced from online repositories and others were photocopied directly from original or facsimile editions.

This collection includes catalogs from over 100 brands, many of which are represented by only a single catalog. Brands which are more strongly represented in the collection, or which are of particular significance, include Bulova, Howard, Hamilton, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Junghans, Omega, Seth Thomas, Swatch, and Tissot.

Fortunat Mueller-Maerki was born in Switzerland in 1946 and developed a love for clocks and watches at a young age. As a student at the University of Zurich, Mueller-Maerki was living with his grandfather when the latter inherited a 300-year-old table clock and had it restored, introducing Mueller-Maerki to the world of horology and clock collecting. After receiving a master's degree in economics from the University of Bern, Mueller-Maerki attended Harvard Business School and graduated in 1975 with a master's degree in business administration. He joined the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC) as he began his career as an executive recruiter in the United States. There he took clock repair classes and became fascinated by the history of timekeeping. He continued to collect clocks but also began to collect publications on horology with a broad scope including all aspects of time and timekeeping. As he built his private collection, Mueller-Maerki continued to give back to the NAWCC by donating publications to their library, and in 2018 the NAWCC's library was renamed in his honor. In 2021, with the aim of making his collection accessible to as many people as possible, Mueller-Maerki donated his private library and archival holdings to the Horological Society of New York. This donation became the core of the Jost Bürgi Research Library. In addition to his contributions to horological libraries, Mueller-Maerki has been an active member of the horological community, contributing over 200 articles to the NAWCC's Watch and Clock Bulletin and organizing study tours of horological sites of interest across Europe and America.

The Watch and Clock Brand Catalogs Collection was part of the archival holdings contributed by Mueller-Maerki in his donation to HSNY. Mueller-Maerki actively collected ephemera that would not otherwise have been preserved such as brochures from swap meets, email newsletters, postcards, advertisements, and syllabi from watchmaking schools. His collecting philosophy was ever focused on preserving material that would otherwise be vulnerable to loss or destruction. The items in this collection have been separated out from Mueller-Maerki's larger ephemera by the archivists at the Horological Society of New York to form an artificial collection.

Materials chiefly in English, with additional material in German and French.