
Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. In recent years, he has reduced his clock-repair activities and now devotes his time to research, writing, travel, lecturing, and conference planning.
A Silver Star Fellow - one of the NAWCC's highest honors - of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, he served as chairman of its Time Symposium Committee. He organized ground-breaking horology-related conferences at the Winterthur Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Henry Ford Museum, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and assisted in creating the 2019 "Time Made in Germany" international symposium in Nuremberg. The 2022 symposium, "Horology's Great Collectors," was in October in New York city.
As a scholar of horology, and assisted by a personal library of 800 books on the subject, he has published more than 100 articles and reviews in Maine Antique Digest, Watch & Clock Bulletin, and elsewhere. He has presented more than 100 lectures to historical societies, service organizations and academic groups. His ongoing "Horology in Art" project examines seven centuries of fine art paintings which include a timepiece within the scene, and his related collection now numbers more than two thousand images.
For more than five years, he wrote detailed catalogue descriptions for thousands of antique clocks and watches offered at the auctions of R.O. Schmitt Fine Arts -- now Schmitt Horan & Company.
He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London, a Proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum, and Exhibit Curator of the Horological Society of New York, creating exhibits for America's first watchmaking guild. The completed manuscript of a comprehensive book on Edward Duffield, a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, is awaiting publiction by the American Philosophical Society.
After graduating from George Washington University in 1973, he worked ten years on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., as a speechwriter, legislative assistant and press secretary for Congressman John Conyers of Detroit and then for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, New York. The next ten years he ran AKKO, Inc., a Lawrence, Massachusetts, acrylic furniture manufacturing company.
While residing in Lawrence he chaired the city’s Planning Board. For ten years, he was a trustee of The White Fund, Inc., a local charitable foundation, and a trustee of the Lawrence Public Library.
Age 71, he is married to writer Jeanne Schinto and lives in historic Shawsheen Village within Andover, Massachusetts, his home town.
