WORLDTEMPUS - 17 March 2010
Elizabeth Doerr
When IWC invited the established watch press to Schaffhausen yesterday to introduce a new book, few of the guests were really prepared for what it was they were about to be introduced to; watch company catalogues are after all a dime a dozen.
Knowing Georges Kern's penchant for prominent artists, however, it might have been clear that this would be no ordinary project. In fact, it is probably safe to say there has never been anything like this before in the watch world. At the launch event staged at the manufactory located on the Rhine, Kern explained that the objective was to try to get a broader audience interested and educated. Thus, three years ago Kern and Manfred Fritz, IWC's “house journalist,” a German newspaperman responsible for much of the company's founded written communiqués, embarked upon a project that would end up being a “book in book” concept featuring six fictional short stories on the subject of time by the Brazilian bestselling author and illustrations by the Parisian cartoonist.
Coelho explained in his emotional way that he first said no to the book project when approached in 2007. However, the more he thought about it, the more the stories on the subject of time began to formulate in his head and he ended up agreeing. “I write my books out of passion, and this is the first for me based on this subject,” he explained.
The three men collaborated on the book from a distance and without meeting for most of the three years it took to complete. Fritz's portion of the book constitutes a narrative history from a journalist's point of view, and he describes it as something “that should be fun to read.”
Some of the six short stories that Coelho created for his fictional portion of the project are available as podcasts, otherwise fans will have to wait until the end of April to buy one of the 10,000 copies of the 536-page hardbound book being printed in a run of 10,000 copies in English, French, and German versions. Coelho's stories were written in his native Portuguese, thus his normal literary translators were utilized to render the works in the desired languages. IWC Schaffhausen. Engineering Time since 1868 will be available for 250 Swiss francs on the company's own website or through regular bookstores.
