It’s been almost eight years in the making and it’s taken lots of work to get here but here we are: my book, Marie Antoinette’s Watch, is now available in ebook and paperback. I’m working with a publisher called Zola Books to distribute the ebook version and I’ve been working with Victor Marks of A Blog To Watch to solve the myriad issues with printing the paperback version. Both are ready to go and I want you guys to be the first to get them.
You can buy the paperback from Createspace now and it will soon be on Amazon.
Making this book has been a labor of love. I began it in 2006 before the Marie Antoinette was ever found and have been perfecting it since. It’s a fascinating story and one that I know you watch lovers will absolutely want to read. I’ll be posting excerpts around the web but I want you guys to get the first copies here first.
If you’d like a signed paperback please let me know by emailing john@biggs.cc and including your address. The price is $19.99 and I’m happy to buy a copy for you, sign it, and send it along for that price. Just let me know.
You guys have been amazing and I thank you all for your support over the years. I don’t show up on this site often but I feel good knowing that Patrick and Matthew are keeping content flowing and you guys are still visiting. If I can do anything for you, don’t hesitate to ask.
You can grab an ebook below or buy the paperback here.
MARIE ANTOINETTE’S WATCH
Adultery, Larceny & Perpetual Motion
The 200 year pursuit of history’s greatest tech device
by John Biggs
Across continents and into and out of the hands of royalty, revolutionaries, smugglers, thieves, and the world’s greatest tech engineers, was Marie Antoinette?s watch, the “160,” worth an estimated $40 million in today’s dollars. Perhaps the most sought after personal technology device of the last 200 years, the timepiece, designed by the legendary Abraham-Louis Breguet, is the launching point for a thrilling and fluidly woven set of narratives that are, in part, forbidden love story, historical document, and police procedural. Marie Antoinette’s Watch also deftly lays out the history of horology and the 18th Century engineering feats attained in Paris’s answer to Silicon Valley, the ?le de la Cit?, that made the watch the most intricate and prized personal device of its time – something that’s come full circle today. In the hands of Techcrunch’s East Coast Editor, John Biggs, Marie Antoinette’s Watch is by turns edifying and lurid, historical and utterly modern. Culminating in a heist in a Tel Aviv antiquities museum in the 1980s, Biggs tells the story of how one object can transform countries, cultures, high technology, and time itself.