Thirty years of buying quietly, and now the difficult part.

It began at the Flohschanze in Hamburg in 1994 with an Eterna-Matic Centenaire that cost me most of a month's wages. I still have it, and it is not for sale. What followed was thirty years of buying from families clearing out an estate, from watchmakers retiring, occasionally from other collectors — almost never at auction, where the prices stopped making sense to me around 2010.

I never dealt. Nothing here was bought to be sold on, which is why the collection has no logic a dealer would recognise: no Submariners, three alarm watches, an unreasonable number of small gold dress pieces from the fifties. It is a record of what one person happened to like.

I am sixty-eight. My eyes are not what they were for setting a hairspring, and a collection this size has become something to insure and worry about rather than enjoy. So I am keeping six — the Eterna among them — and letting the other forty-six go, deliberately, one at a time, to people who will wear them rather than store them in a safe deposit box. This happens once. I am not restocking, not sourcing, not becoming a dealer at sixty-eight; when the forty-sixth watch is sold this website is finished and I will take it down.