The Octagon and the Anvil — Audemars Piguet

In 1972, a struggling old manufacture from the Vallée de Joux did something close to reckless: it put a steel sports watch on the market and priced it like gold. No one had asked for it. By every rule of the trade it should have failed. Instead the Royal Oak rewrote what luxury meant, and the octagon became the most famous shape in watchmaking.

This monograph looks behind that shape. Audemars Piguet is far older and far deeper than the watch that saved it, and the century of quiet mastery that preceded 1972 — the minute repeaters, the complicated pocket watches, the independence of a house still owned by its founding families — is the real story. So is the nerve it took to break the rules, and the discipline it took to keep breaking them without losing the thread.

We walk the house from the Vallée de Joux to the present: the founders, the philosophy, the complications it does like no one else, the tapisserie dial and the exposed screws, and the collector psychology that turned an unwanted steel watch into the most coveted object in the modern market. Richly illustrated, with a glossary of house terms.

The nerve to break the rules, studied properly.

For those who understand.