That's THE Heuer Bible. I still remember the moment when we entered the conference room at TAG Heuer in September 2013...together with Mr.Jack W.Heuer, he was very surprised to see all those dials as well. Lovely memories!
There were plenty of other pages, but typically of older dials from lesser-known models. But yes, what a resource! TAG Heuer have done a good job re-building their archive, thanks to Jack Heuer sharing some of his own personal documents. My sense is that when the new broom of management came through in the early 1980s, they made sure the new offices were nice and clean by throwing out all of the "old rubbish"!
Jack gave me a couple of copies of this a while back. I'll see if I have a spare one lying around .....:-0
As a side note I wonder how radioactive that thing was when it was assembled, though I'm guessing Heuer didn't do a whole lot of radium dials before tritium came in in the 60s.
It was amazing that Jack didn't know this existed until the Heuer Collectors Summit last year! I'll never forget his face when he entered the room and said quietly to himself, "I didn't know we still had these." The big shame is that the book recording all the serial numbers is lost - presumably in some Swiss landfill. I really wish that was still around so that TAG Heuer could issue Certificates of Extract.
Yeah, there has been some absolute gold thrown out over the years. I am sure that TAG Heuer wishes that Jack had paid his departing watchmakers in cash rather than in spare parts too!
Hell, even the Zenith El Primero movements that power the Calibre 36 Carreras were nearly lost back in 1975, when some executives that didn't understand what they were doing decided automatic chonographs were a waste of space, scary to think those watches wouldn't exist today were it not for a defiant engineer wanting to preserve one of the most important movements in history.
Was actually just watching the Jack Heuer video on Time & Tide and saw a panning shot of exactly this book in it, would it be ok to embed that video in a new thread?