Watch Of The Week: How The Reverso Flipped My Position On New Watches

By Benjamin Clymer

In Watch of the Week, we invite HODINKEE staffers and friends to explain why they love a certain piece. And we’re kicking off the franchise with our company founder.

Ten years ago right around now, I bought my first meaningful modern watch: A Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, Tribute To 1931, US Edition (2011 version). It’s a very simple watch with a very long name, but it was a revelatory one for me. It wasn’t my literal first contemporary watch as an adult – that would’ve been a really neat Maurice Lacroix Masterpiece using a hand-wound Peseux caliber (that I was able to purchase at Tourneau via a plan they had back then that offered 24 months, interest-free), or an Oris Formula 1 that I think I paid no more than $650 for (also at Tourneau).

Both were fantastic watches that I bought in my pre-HODINKEE life, and that I wish I still had, but that unfortunately were sold during the period where I was no longer employed by any meaningful company and HODINKEE was really just a blog I wrote to entertain myself while my girlfriend was uptown at school between the hours of 9am and 4pm – after which point we could continue our drinking, smoking, and whatever else early 20-somethings do while living in a walk-up shoe-box in Nolita (29 Spring Street, Apartment 4, if you’re curious) while effectively unemployed.

Shortly after that really wonderful and rather romantic period of my life ended – the watches left, and so did the girlfriend. I moved across town and started to really grind on HODINKEE in a new kind of way. My fascination with watches became an obsession, and my interests turned squarely to vintage watches.

In came the Omega Ranchero that I bought at Antiquorum. (Tip: There’s a thing called buyer’s premium, and another thing called New York State sales tax that will make the price you think you’re paying actually be about 35% higher in the end – learned that one the very hard way on the Omega). I spent the next few years living two lives – one trying to be a relatively normal graduate student in journalism – writing real stories about real things, such as a pair of synagogues in Brighton Beach filing a lawsuit against …read more