I think every vintage Hamilton watch collector has thought about how to organize a collector guide. It's incredibly helpful to know what you're looking at when you find a vintage Hamilton in the wild or if you're handed one as a family heirloom.
Identifying models is one of the primary reasons why I started my blog. It's also the most common question that I am asked, and I'm asked it pretty much daily by people around the world.
One of the original "silver backs" of the Hamilton Watch community, Rene Rondeau, created a book that is now decades old and long out of print. For many years it was the best reference book out there and copies on eBay sold for 10x the original sales price. For all it's goodness it had many omissions and even Rene would agree it was due for an update.
There are really two challenging aspects to creating a reference guide. First is to gather the requisite information... what is it, when was it made, etc, etc. The second is how to describe it - and that's more challenging than you'd immediately think. It quickly feels like you're looking for a needle in a stack of needles. You have to be very specific. For example, what is the case made of, what is the shape of the dial, are the hour indices numbers or markers, is there a second hand, what movement is inside? You could go on and on in order to narrow down the possible options. After all, there are 974 models to choose from! (Even more once you consider awards division, European models, et al)
Lastly, you'd have to find a way to make it available.
At long last, that day has arrived!
A very talented and committed collector, Andrew Krug, has accomplished the un-accomplishable and created a soon-to-be released book, "The Hamilton Field Guide". The book will be available on or about July 7th on Amazon.
In addition to the book, Andrew has created a fantastic website... HamiltonFieldGuide.com. This website will help you identify an unknown model and learn more about it.
The focus of the book is the myriad non-Electric models. That's mainly because the Electrics are already well documented by another resource that Rene Rondeau authored, "The Watch of the Future" and there's little to be added. It's available here... https://www.hamiltonwristwatch.com/book.html
When it comes to identifying a model, let's pretend we want to identify the K-407 in the photo above. How would you describe it?
Well, it's round (circle), it's got a sweep second hand, if you had it in your hand you'd know it's 10K gold filled. The dial markers are gold and there are numbers a 12 and 6 only. We know it's an automatic (says so on the dial). We also know there isn't a date complication. That's probably enough to get into the ball park but you could go further like if it had diamonds or you knew the movement caliber inside.
Once you click "search" the results show up below. You could have multiple pages to scroll through but with just what I've entered above you can see we have a match with the second option below.
I hope you'll reward Andrew's effort by purchasing his book!
I'll update this post once the link is available.
