Why David Silver’s New Vintage Rolex Coffee Table Book Is Essential Reading for Collectors

It’s something of an understatement to describe vintage Rolex collectors as meticulous. From the nuanced color change of a tropical dial to the degree of fade on a bezel, the tiniest elements of a Rolex watch matter to devotees—sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

In David Silver’s new book, Vintage Rolex: New Edition: The Largest Collection in the World, there’s something for everyone—even those with a cursory interest in the Crown. His new 432-page tome features more than 2,100 full-color photographs, assembled with the care and attention to detail of a true Rolex aesthete.

“It’s all very pictorial,” Silver, co-owner of the Vintage Watch Company (the pre-owned Rolex store that his father, John Silver, established in 1995 in London’s famed Burlington Arcade), tells Robb Report. “I’m not here to give lots of technical information because that’s not my customers’ focus. And it’s not mine. I’m an aesthetic person. You can view this book as if you were viewing a Tom Ford fashion book or an interiors design book or a cookery book—the goal is to be seduced by the images.”

Published on the occasion of the Vintage Watch Company’s 30th anniversary, the new edition, which retails for $130, updates Silver’s original 2020 volume with an additional 300 watch images and two new chapters, including one dedicated to Rolex tropical watches and another to the brand’s exclusive collaboration with Tiffany & Co.

What makes the book so extraordinary is that is functions as a de facto catalogue for a mythical Rolex museum, chock full of images of timepieces from every Rolex era, dating to 1908, three years after the brand was founded. Every watch that appears in the book has been offered for sale by the Vintage Watch Company.

“My father started the business in 1995,” Silver says. “Every single watch in here has passed through our hands, has been individually photographed, and is photographed in exactly the same way: with a smiley face at 10 to 2, and the seconds hand at 25 past. The detail is exceptional.

“All this has come around by accident because we professionally photographed every watch we wanted to feature on the website,” Silver adds. “We’ve been doing that for 30 years. That’s why we have such an archive. It would be absolutely uneconomical to produce this book today. You’re talking hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of photography over the years. It could only have happened because of the way we’ve been doing it.”

The original volume, which came out during the early days of the pandemic, featured a striking cover image: a vintage Rolex Day-Date with a bright yellow “Stella dial,” a term referring to a series of Rolex watches bearing vibrantly colored and highly collectible lacquer dials produced by Rolex, primarily for the Middle Eastern market, in the 1970s and ’80s. The 2025 edition of the book, however, leads with an image of a Day-Date with a lilac-colored Stella dial.

“Purple really stood out because I have only ever had two purple watches in 30 years,” Silver says. “If you speak to Middle Eastern collectors that remember the late ’70s, early ’80s, they remember their parents having them in the back of the safe somewhere. And they weren’t that popular. That’s why they’re so rare—because they just were too much too soon in a sense.”

(To honor the Vintage Watch Company’s three decades in business, Silver is also offering three other rare Stella color dial book covers in limited editions of lilac, mint green, and blue.)

The book unfolds chronologically, from Rolex’s “early vintage” period, when it produced pocket watches; officer’s watches, often in hunter-style cases; and ladies’ diamond watches. “If I told you these were Rolexes, you’d think I was mad,” he says, pointing to an image of a c. 1920 white gold and diamond-set rectangular cocktail watch on a black silk strap, featured on page 61.

In 1926, Rolex introduced its game-changing, hermetically sealed Oyster case, to which Silver has devoted an entire chapter. “The Oyster is the first waterproof watch, made famous by Mercedes Gleitz swimming the English Channel with it and having it still working at the other end,” he says. “We contacted her family and were lucky enough to get some imagery at the beginning of the book of her wearing the watch. Now, she never wore it on the wrist—that’s folklore. She wore it on a little chain around her neck.”

By the time the book gets to the 1950s, “things start to change,” Silver says. “Obviously, Rolex is known for its sport watches. All the big accomplishments start to happen in the 1950s. The landmark collections are the 1953 Submariner, made for diving. The GMT made for Pan Am and the transatlantic pilot in 1954. The Milgauss first comes into production in ’56. The Explorer goes up, obviously, Mt. Everest in 1953. And then you have the Daytona.”

Silver set aside a whole chapter for the Paul Newman variant of the Daytona, “which Rolex just referred to as an ‘exotic dial’ in their marketing material at the time,” he says. “It was given by Joanne Woodward to Paul Newman with the inscription ‘Drive Carefully Me,’ and he wore it most of his life. It came up for auction in 2017, at Phillips in New York. And that is the single most important turning point in vintage. The fact that that watch sold for $17 million on that day put Rolex and vintage Rolex on the map worldwide outside of watches. The allure and the romanticism and the most famous actor you could find wearing the most iconic watch—there was no better coupling.”

Rolex’s quirkier flights of fancy are given plenty of attention in these pages, too, from watches with houndstooth pattern dials to Stella and stone dial variations in every color and gem material under the sun, including onyx, coral, tiger’s eye, malachite, lapis, and the rarest opal.

Read the captions closely and you’ll find intriguing hints of provenance. Take, for example, a 1977 platinum Oyster Day-Date featured on page 247, with a blue dial and bespoke sapphire baguette markers on an “Octopus” platinum bracelet (“The bracelet has baguette stones through the center and brilliants on the side, and they look like the tentacles of an octopus,” says Silver). The initials “A K” appear above the words “superlative chronometer” at 6 o’clock.

“This was made for Adnan Khashoggi, who was a Saudi industrialist billionaire—well, really an arms dealer, but he called himself a businessman,” Silver says. 

Silver emphasizes that in addition to serving as a pictorial history of Rolex’s production, the book documents the Vintage Watch Company’s history as well, focusing on “the style and salability of pieces that we wanted to own ourselves,” he says. “The uniqueness of our store is that it is the largest collection on display anywhere in the world. And it is a wholly owned collection. Most watch stores borrow or do consignment. That’s not our vibe. If we want it, we own it, clean it, and whether we sell it today or tomorrow doesn’t really make a big difference.”

In the five years since the original volume was published, the Silvers have accumulated more inventory. “There are 300 new images in the book that weren’t in the first one,” Silver says. 

The desire to cover in greater depth both tropical dials and Rolex’s tie-up with Tiffany inspired Silver to add two additional chapters. In the case of the former, he makes clear that while Rolex considers tropical dials—so called because the dials have changed color, due to climate and environmental factors—a defect, the market tends to value them as rare and extremely collectible.

“It’s paint that’s reacting with environments, like saltwater,” Silver says. “Part of Rolex’s legacy is to continually evolve and not have anything change. So they want to get away from this ever happening. We want it to happen more because it makes the watches more unique.”

The Tiffany chapter reflects Silver’s conviction that the Blue Box retailer’s partnership with the Crown is “one of the greatest collaborations of all time,” he says. “The merging of two super brands together on the dial is extremely iconic and basically only came about because Rolex allowed Tiffany in their boutique in New York to sign the dials themselves. If you are ever lucky enough to get the original box, they did come with the iconic blue also.”

Despite Silver’s impressive grasp of Rolex minutiae, he’s the first to acknowledge that he isn’t a watch buff, per se. “I don’t obsess about the watch industry as a whole,” he says. “I’m much more interested in what colors are of the season or the catwalks or design or interiors or art because that influences me much more than what Omega or Audemars Piguet are going to do.”

For example, he points to the bookmark ribbon. “NATO straps are a particular passion of mine, which is why the actual ribbon of the book—no one uses ribbons on books anymore—is based on a NATO strap design,” Silver says.

Something else to consider: Unlike the original volume, the 2025 update offers readers the possibility of going from “catwalk to collection” because some of the watches featured in its pages are still available for purchase at the store. Says Silver: “There will be an opportunity this time to buy things live, as it were.”

This article originally appeared in Robb Report US.