Author: Catalogue - watches. Yoshida Watch Company.
Title: Fancy Smart ... Yoshida Watch Company [from the cover].
Description: [Tokyo? 193-?]. 15x22cm publisher's illustrated wrapper; 18pp, illustrated throughout. Pencil inscription on the front, staples disintegrated but rather good with a couple of special offer inserts and a four page illustrated clock leaflet dated 1929 inserted. ¶ There were two Yoshida watch companies in Tokyo at this time. One, founded in 1920, still exists as a high class salon in Shibuya, and the other, which began as a wholesaler in 1901 started manufacturing watches in the 1930s. They morphed over the decades into Orient watches, a subsidiary of Seiko. This seems the more likely if we have to choose between the two. One inserted slip offers a 50% wholesale discount.Quite smart, a lot of deco, mostly for men with a few women's watches at the end. A couple of these seem very expensive: 370 yen against a man's watch for less than 20 yen.

Keywords: applied arts manufactures trade catalogues clocks watches time c20th Japan modernism fashion