OWNED: QP Magazine

I've been reading QP (quantième perpétuelle) for a few years now and as is the way with these things, it didn't take me long to start 'collecting' them and buying the binders and (naturally) trying to pick up back issues from eBay. There's a lot to go at considering we're on issue #84 right now, but to me the really early ones are not so good. I had (I think) #7 which I read and then sold back on eBay, because it simply wasn't the same magazine to me. It was rather more 'technical' in the early days and more focused on articles about pinion wheels and the like, which is fine, but I really buy QP to drool over beautiful photographs of Roger Dubuis double tourbillons and other watches that I'll never own, and frankly the magazine has definitely come round to my way of thinking as it's now 95% watch porn.

I had collected all the magazines back to issue #60, and then a few prior to that, so I was rather happy to find someone selling pretty much every issue back to the early ones on eBay for £3.99 each (usual going rate seems to be about £6-8.00, and to be fair it costs about £3.00 to post one of these) and quickly bought an issue with the TAG Heuer Mikrograph on the cover and issue #4 (pictured above) only because it had the Monaco Sixty Nine on the cover, and I couldn't pass that up.

I also bought issue #40 because it had a rather lovely looking AP Royal Oak Offshore on the cover, and as it happens it also has an article about the TAG Heuer Monaco V4 in it, so that was a right result!

Having bought and paid for these three, the seller than contacted me and asked if I would be interested in buying more issues on a 'bulk' basis, so I decided to buy all the ones I was missing back to issue #40 and he offered me a very reasonable £30 for eleven issues. They arrived promptly and well packaged and I am very happy indeed with my purchase, although truth be told I have barely had a chance to look at them yet, but they are in excellent condition and that's the main thing (and honestly if I did decide to sell them on I would easily turn a profit, so I can't really lose here).

Q.P. is owned by The Telegraph group, and I really like it, but damn it is a frustrating magazine at times. For a start, it never seems to come out when it's supposed to, I remember picking issue #83 up at WH Smiths in mid September (my subscription had lapsed and they didn't contact me to ask me to renew it - I mean, what the hell, magazines usually prompt you months before your subs run out) so I made a note to look for it in mid-December. No luck... I tried several times and then emailed QP themselves to ask when the magazine would be in the shops and the email that came back beggared belief.

"Which issue are you looking for?"

As you can imagine, it took all of my resolve not to email back an extremely sarcastic reply ('Summer 2019 please...') and calmly stated 'Issue #84', to which I got this answer...

"It should be in the shops now, but if not it should be within a couple of weeks."

Excellent. I don't know what I would have done without you.

So I'm now reading issue #84, which I eventually got in very early January. One of the articles in the magazine is previewing a vintage watch auction due to take place at the end of November. Another, much larger part of the magazine is given over to promoting QP's own watch show in London in early December (Salon QP). The magazine was never going to come out before either of these events so what the hell is the point of that?

Let me just repeat that, they are promoting their own yearly London show, in a magazine that they know will come out after the show has finished. You couldn't make this up.

Also (I'm sorry to go on, but as much as I love this magazine it infuriates me... because if I was as shoddy as this in my job I would rightfully expect to be on my way!) the magazine is littered with mistakes, admittedly this month seems better than it has of late, but still there are mistakes. One of the most common mistakes they make is when the journalist has seemingly corrected a sentence but not done it properly and left both the original and the new word in the same sentence. For example, if you were to change "I sold my car" to "I sold our car" you would end up with "I sold my our car". And this happens a lot. I don't know who proof reads this magazine, but they are utter clownshoes.

The other mistake they tend to make is sentences just ending, and by that I mean they get to the bottom of the page and then when you start the next column it's a new sentence, who knows where the last part of the previous sentence went? Also, they do the same thing in the text under the heading, you know... the text that's MUCH BIGGER than the rest of the page, but not quite as big as the headline.

For example, in the current issue on page 30 there is an article about a new Bremont which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force with a trilogy of complicated limited

I presume the last word in that sentence was supposed to be 'editions'.

And honestly this is not me being picky and pointing out a rare mistake, this is just normal for QP unfortunately, which considering it's a magazine about a high-end product seems incredible to me. 

But still, I buy it, even though it really doesn't cover TAG Heuer very much at all, indeed even the recent issue with the Autavia on the cover was a bit of a disappointment as rather than an in depth look at the highly lauded new timepiece, it was merely part of an article focusing on a selection of watches that are inspired by auto racing. Hmm...

Well, I don't know about you, but I feel better having got all that of my chest!

Needless to say, issue #85 will be in the shops when it damned well feels like it and will no doubt feature a preview of both SIHH and Baselworld... which by then, of course, will be a distant memory. Still, since I've renewed my subscription, at least I won't be trolling around WH Smiths every day trying to find it!