Bulova 1948 His Excellency

oh, carry on then.... : )  but, prior to the 1940's We have the 1930's and the 'AMERICAN CLIPPER' variants (which were single letter only).  Why would Bulova skip the 40's and why 2 letters?

Yes, the '30s also had variants of the Minute Man and the Rite Angle. . . and probably others that I can't recall at the moment.  In the early 1940s, there were many variants of the President.

I don't think Bulova skipped the 40s, I just think they treated the 1940s His Excellencies and the 1950s Academy Awards differently--more simply than some other variant lines.  In the late 1940s, they converted a whole lot of models that were formerly called something else to a variant of the His Excellency, e.g., the Director, Treasurer, Ambassador, Princeton, Statesman, etc.  That's how they created the first His Excellency line.  From a review of the ads that we have, the differences are about the case style, nothing more.

Later, things got much more complicated, and bands, and dials, and hands do matter to the variant ID at that point.

I think the question of why some of the variants we see have one letter and why some have two is interesting.  It does imply that we are still missing a lot of ads, and the truth as we see it now--based on the ads we have--may be far from the actual, complete truth.

I can name one example that pretty well contradicts everything I just said, and that's the late 1940s His Excellency J and JJ.  The difference there appears to be the dial.

short of jewelers cataloguers, I bet many variants were not in any ad publications like Sears, Monkey Wards, etc or those on site.  Just cause they made it didn't mean they advertised it....and w/ Bulova, patterns btwn series do change- like Nova and OldTicker said- as simple as a management change.

His Excellency three stars.  "NN" still two stars?  Can ya sway me since I'm typing but not voting on this one yet?

I have no problem with this one as an "NN", because both ads state that the "NN" came in white, pink, or yellow, and we have no ads that indicate those variations were given different names.  This one has the matching bracelet as shown in the NN ad, and it has the correct dial--if you assume that the color would change with the gold color.

If you want a definitive answer regarding whether those other colors were really called something else and either not advertised as such, or we simply don't have the ads, then I can't give you that.  I can tell you that I consider my pink gold version, with matching bracelet, to be an "NN".

....of coarse they were assigned different variant letters, they're different. The ads are describing what is shown, not what else was available. IMO. William, With 8 different models available not all would be the 'M' variant.