Watches, Stories, and Gear: An Unusual Seiko Diver, Edward Gorey’s Victorian Horrors, and More

“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a weekly roundup of some of our favorite watch content, great stories from around the web, and cool gear that we’ve got our eye on.

This week’s installment is brought to you by Oak & Oscar.

Founded in 2015 by Chase Fancher, Oak & Oscar has seen notable success in its three short years of operation. The brand’s first two watches, the Burnham and Sandford, have long sold out, and the third, the Jackson Flyback Chronograph, is well on its way to becoming another Oak & Oscar classic.

Oak & Oscar’s latest is the Humboldt, a 40-millimeter traveler’s watch and the brand’s first non-limited release. The Humboldt features Oak & Oscar’s familiar design language, and it comes equipped with a 12-hour bi-directional bezel for tracking an additional time zone. Another first for the brand, the Humboldt comes paired with a stainless steel bracelet. The watch is rated to 20 ATM, has a double domed sapphire crystal, and is powered by a Swiss-made ETA 2892-A2, a proven workhorse.

To learn more about Oak & Oscar and the Humboldt (currently available for $1,450 on strap and $1,650 on bracelet), click here.

Watches

Fratello Watches; “#TBT Seiko SBCM023 Perpetual Calendar Diver – Crazy Accuracy in a Familiar Case”

Our friends over at Fratello Watches recently wrote about a really unique and little-known Seiko dive watch: the Ref. SBCM023 Perpetual Calendar Diver. While it may just look like a tried-and-true SKX007 (or one of its many offshoots), this ISO-rated dive watch, first introduced in 2003, is actually powered by an impressive perpetual calendar quartz movement accurate to 20 seconds a year. This watch was largely a JDM release, and after a seven year run it was discontinued in 2010. As you may expect, this is quickly becoming a collector’s item, and Fratello has the full rundown.

Click here to read more.

Affordable Vintage: Enicar Seapearl 600

“Most seasoned watch collectors are well versed in the connection between famous explorers and their watches. Companies like Rolex, Omega, and Jaeger-LeCoultre are just some of the well-known brands to send their watches on great expeditions and then cash in on the resulting popularity with advertising. If you read our article on the Croton Nivada Grenchen Antarctic, you’ll know that it wasn’t just the bigger players taking part in this; smaller brands were also taking advantage of this marketing opportunity. One of the lesser known Swiss brands to do so was Enicar.”

Click here to read more.

Stories

The New Yorker; “Edward Gorey’s Enigmatic World”

“Many Gorey books are little more than thirty pages long: a series of illustrations, one per page, accompanied, at the lower margin or on the facing page, by maybe two or three lines of text, sometimes verse, sometimes prose.

In the white space that remained, Gorey felt, wit had room to flower. A beautiful example is his early book “The Doubtful Guest” (1957). Here, members of a respectable Victorian family are standing around one night, looking bored, when their doorbell rings. They open the door and find no one. But they scout around the porch, and finally, on the top of an urn at the end of the balustrade, they see something peculiar. It sort of resembles a penguin. On the other hand, it has fur and wears white sneakers. In any case, by the next page it is standing in the family’s foyer with its nose to the wallpaper, looking frightened but insistent, while they huddle in the next room, trying to figure out what to do. By the morning, the creature has made itself at home. An illustration shows us the family at the breakfast table, in their tight-fitting clothes, acting as though everything is perfectly fine, while the Guest, seated among them, and having finished what was on its plate, has begun eating the plate.”

Click here to read more.

 GQ; “Miracle at Tham Luang”

“Six days after the miracle, when the boys were cocooned in a sterile hospital and the divers had flown home and almost all of the journalists had dispersed, people came to the cave again. There were villagers from the flatlands beneath the Doi Nang Non, the mountains that rise between Thailand and Myanmar, and there were volunteers, hundreds of them in their lemon yellow shirts and sky blue caps, who had been there for most of the 18 days the miracle had required. There were monks, too, at a makeshift dais on the footpath to the cave, and there were dignitaries—local authorities, the families of the boys who’d been blessed by the miracle—in rows of chairs under a long tent.”

Click here to read more.

Gear

DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal

High-quality videography has become more accessible thanks to companies like DJI. The brand’s latest is the Osmo Pocket Gimbal, a nifty little tool that’s sure to make your home movies feel more cinematic than ever. With the whole unit weighing just over four ounces and featuring 3-axis stabilization, a built-in 4K camera capable of shooting 60 fps at 4K and raw stills, the Osmo Pocket Gimbal will be your new go-to piece of kit for everything from vacations to that school recital.

$350—Preorder here

Small Batch L.L.Bean Boot, 8″ (Leather and Chamois-Lined)

Bean boots are an American classic. They’re virtually impenetrable—courtesy of the hardwearing rubber base and thick leather uppers—so they’ll take you through fall and right into winter. The fact that the design has remained largely unchanged since 1911 is a testament to their quality and unrivaled utility, and they’re still made in L.L. Bean’s factory in Brunswick, Maine.

Bean boots come in a number of different setups, and this small batch version features maroon leather uppers lined in flannel chamois cloth for a little bit extra warmth down the line.

$160—Shop here