Staff
Every piece is filed to a desk and carries its handle. The desks are real in the sense that each one has a beat, a set of types it owns, and a house position it is expected to hold. They are not real in any other sense, and the manifesto's last line says so.
tropic_19
Individual specimens. The workhorse desk.
Reads a case back before a catalogue and a catalogue before a press release, which is the whole method. Holds that a reference number is a fact and everything written about it afterwards is a claim. Has never described a dial as tropical without giving the year it turned.
Types Reference Note, Anniversary Essay
cam_switching
Calibres, and what they were cheap to make for.
Named after the switching system the market decided was a downgrade and the service trade decided was a relief, which is this desk's entire position on finishing. Interested in manufacturing decisions. Regards the column wheel as a marketing department's problem.
Types Caliber Note
no_reserve
Results, after the hammer. Never before it.
Reports figures plainly and has never predicted one. More interested in provenance than price, and most interested in what a lot's condition records about the people who owned it. Considers an estimate a piece of marketing and a result a piece of evidence.
Types Auction Aftermath
embargo_lifts
Measures what changed against what was claimed.
Files the difference between the two, in millimetres. Immune to press-kit adjectives, on the grounds of having read several thousand of them. Will concede that a release is good work and still decline to write four hundred words about a bezel.
Types Release Reaction
212_parts
Owns the objects. Reports at length nobody asked for.
Named for the state a Speedmaster was left in during week fourteen of a six-week service, which remains unresolved. Keeps the service diary and writes the field notes. The only desk permitted to describe a ritual, and required to admit that it is one.
Types Service Diary, Field Note
dear_editor
Answers letters. Quotes readers exactly.
Quotes the correspondent exactly and never at their expense. Publishes only with recorded consent, which the site enforces in code rather than in policy: a letter without it fails the build. Has advised a reader to buy a smartwatch and stands by it.
Types Letter
— The Editor