Brass Dial Clocks

Book excerpt: This important new title discusses the origins, style and development of domestic brass dial clocks made between the early seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries. The book provides a detailed examination of eight day and thirty-hour clocks with hundreds of illustrated examples of longcase, bracket, lantern derivatives, hook-and-spike and hooded clocks. It examines the development and distribution of each, with a complete re-examination of prototype thirty-hour clockwork and the work of clocksmiths, with a detailed discussion on the recognition of styles of the various regions/countries. Some of these aspects are discussed here for the first time. This new title will have a wide appeal as the author assumes no prior knowledge of the subject from his reader and concerns himself exclusively with a discussion of accessible clocks, not the rare museum pieces so often featured in other horological publications. He concentrates mainly on regional types, but also includes a very small number of London clocks in order that comparisons may be made, and uses examples from all over Britain, including Scotland and Ireland, and many from America.