Buci Writes A Short Story Into The Nouvelle, a 36mm Hand-Wound Watch With Calligraphed Numerals

Most watches built around a literary concept, and there really aren't a lot of them around, end up as a normal watch with a paragraph of backstory attached. Buci, the small Paris brand run by Nousseïma Baraket, takes the brief a bit more seriously: book-page edges on the case, blotting-paper texture on the dial, pen nib shaped hands. Nouvelle is Buci's second collection after Garde-Temps, and the theme this time is the short story.

The steel case measures a pretty nice 36mm wide and 9.88mm thick. The oval, concave bezel carries over from the first collection, now sharper. The mid-case is fluted to look like the stacked edges of book pages. That could have been a gimmick, but I swear it works for me here. A domed, recessed sapphire crystal sits on top, there's a display caseback, and water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is very cool. Its texture is modeled on blotting paper, in Essentiel (warm aged-paper cream) or Contemplation (dark blue). A Parisian calligrapher painted the numerals by hand, deliberately uneven, and their sizes swell and shrink to form a crescent across the dial. Small seconds with crosshairs sit recessed at nine o'clock. Once an hour the hour and minute hands overlap into the shape of a fountain-pen nib. Very cute. Both hands and numerals get Super-LumiNova.

Inside is the Sellita SW219, a hand-wound calibre in Elaboré grade, beating at 4Hz with 42 hours of power reserve. It's a reliable, easily serviced movement and nothing more. Straps are calfskin on quick-release bars, 18mm wide tapering to 16mm, in grained cream, grained blue, smooth brown or grey nubuck, with a brushed and bead-blasted steel buckle. It ships in a book-shaped box with a notebook.

Now, for a bit of a catch. I hardly ever feature Kickstarter projects because I've been burned too many times. However, Buci is a fairly reliable brand so I'm confident this will work out. The Kickstarter campaign started on September 25th and is open until November 15th. Price is set at €1,550 during the presale and goes up to €1,850 after that. The Buci Nouvelle is limited to 300 pieces. See more on the Buci website.