1. To salerooms, and others, illustrating clocks and watches: please take the trouble to move hands to ten past ten or ten to two. These are the only times when the hands are unlikely to obscure each other, maker’s name, address, town/city, number and positions of winding squares and subsidiary dials. Such visual information is more useful to a potential buyer than a brief, often uninformed, caption.
2. To distinguish between a clock and a timepiece, and between a strike and a chime.
3. To abandon the strange use of English as in signed/stamped ‘to’ the dial, base etc, perfectly illustrated in an auction report on p18 of ATG No 2402 where it is used three times. Where did it come from? Is it a very traditional, provincial or archaic phrase, perhaps justified given the trade we are in, or some modern conceit attempting to appear exclusive and excluding to our trade.
What is wrong with ‘the dial/base signed’ or ‘signed on the dial/base’?
Nicholas Mitchell
Isle of Portland
