Michels SerresVan Cleef & Arpels: The Poetry of Time

Beautiful book to display and to read and look through made a great gift.

This book is a beautiful presentation of more modern VCA time pieces. The photography is stunning, the text is authentic. I was dazzled by the quality of the book--- period. If you are a fan of these jewelers, this book is a must.

This book is loaded with rich photos of VCA's beautiful timepieces. There are 79 pages with full color photos of ladies and men's watches with descriptions in both French and English. The watch in the photo is the centerpiece of Van Cleef & Arpels Midsummer Night's Dream high-jewelry collection depicting impish fairies rendered in sparkling gems (183 diamonds!). The brand combined the fairy motif with a complicated retrograde movement and created the $96,000 Lady Arpels Féerie watch. This book is perfect for luxury jewelry collectors or those of us who wish they were.

I got this as a gift because I'm very into jewelry and collecting books as well. The various shots of the time pieces and jewelry pieces are wonderful but I wish there would have been more in depth descriptions of the pieces and less giant blocks of texts on blank pages. The in-between little essays really hamper the pace of the everything, especially since they are on totally blank white pages and usually end up being quite long winded. Besides those, the book is beautiful.