Prominent figures who patronized the Abercrombie & Fitch Company in its excursion goods days include Amelia Earhart, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Teddy Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway. Their vintage catalogs are a mine of quality, useful items, from canoes, to tents, to shotguns, to fishing rods, and of course, watches.
This watch has exactly the same case as the early Seafarer and a very similar dial and is a great looking three-register, twelve-hour Compax Chronograph. A real beauty, the kind of watch that epitomizes vintage. Steel case with circular brushed domed screw-on back, high-domed crystal, and long-faceted lugs. This type of case was used by Heuer, LeCoultre, and Ulysses Nardin, for their register “sports” type watches – sport meaning pilots, sailors, and horsemen.
The movement is the venerable Valjoux 72 nickel-plated three register twelve-hour movement. Signed “Abercrombie & Fitch Co Switzerland serial 453306.” The case interior is signed “ED Heuer & Co, SWISS.”
This watch has been fitted with a Heuer Vintage Crown.
Now on to the wondrous dial: vertically silver scored with gold-plated rivets in the corners aged to perfection. Signed again “Abercrombie & Fitch,” with “Made in Switzerland” below the register at six p.m. The handset is gold-plated to match the rivets and the Arabic markers, which like the brand name are gilt applied with a black outline, as are the hour pyramid markers running around the outside. The watch came to me fitted with its original crocodile strap signed “Abercrombie & Fitch.” A very pretty watch from the late ’50s.
Alistar Gibbons Book – Chasing Time
