This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Register here.

When it comes to the watch industry’s flagship events, few have as much weight and importance as the Geneva auction season. If Watches and wonders sets the tone for modern pieces, major sales from houses like Christie’s, Phillips, Sotheby’s and Antiquorum help to crystallize what is happening in the world of vintage. Like Sacha Davidoff, one half of the famous Geneva-based vintage watch boutique Roy & Sacha Davidoff, told me once that, compared to Watches and Wonders, “the Geneva auctions are much, much, much, much, much, much bigger because there is vintage being sold. We probably do 10 to 20, maybe 30 times more business. At the start of the week, the watchmaking world gathered in Geneva for this fall’s major auctions.

I kept an even more vigilant eye than usual on these events. because, sales down Ask everyone involved in the business to sound the alarm. So I was interested to see what was selling, why, and how the pieces were performing beyond the big-ticket headliners. There was even some optimism: “It was an encouraging weekend for everyone involved,” Adam Golden of Menta Watches told me.

But first a word about these headliners. There are no two watches greater than a unique Breguet and FP Journe. The FPJ was the second ever made by Journe, and the first he put on the market, for more than $8 million. The Breguet Perpetual Calendar, which sold for over $2 million, is particularly cool because of its importance in watchmaking history: It’s probably the very first watch with a perpetual calendar and date display retrograde (which crosses the dial before returning to its starting point rather than making a full rotation). Coco Chanel’s lover, Paul Iribe, originally owned this Breguet in the 1930s!

The Journe and the Breguet were the subject of much discussion as I contacted half a dozen dealers this week about this week’s auction. But rather than have these experts gush about their diamond of the season, I asked which piece was the most important or revealing finding about the current shape of the watch world. Here are their answers.