An old 1954 paperback copy of Ken Purdy's 1952 The Kings of the Road was this writer's intro to "serious" automotive literature (well, books on cars, anyway) around the time he became entranced by Road & Track after one formative year of living in LA (Dad and I loved it; pioneer cyclist Mom hated it) during the late 50s. Purdy could effortlessly pull a grade-school kid into stories about Bugattis and Duesenbergs, of race driver Tazio Nuvolari, and how to avoid confusing Hispano-Suizas with Isotta-Fraschinis...
Borgeson and Jaderquist's Sports and Classic Cars appeared 3 years after Purdy's book, as the sports car boom was beginning to gather momentum in the US, and collectors were suddenly waking up to landmarks of design and engineering made during the interwar years that had sometimes been sold for scrap during WW2. The photography is monochrome and sparse by modern standards, but the book is strong on history, and the specification tables at the end, covering Prewar Sports, Prewar Classic, and Postwar cars, are a valuable source of information. If you want to compare engine specs., dimensions and prices offered by Lancia before and after WW2, for example, this book has you covered.
Wheelock-Freeman's Sports Cars appeared in 1955, the same year as the Borgeson / Jaderquist book, and while it has some specifications and prices, it focuses more on the visual impact of the cars. The Fifties marked the beginning of Italian dominance in industrial design as well as on the track, and Alexandre Georges covered then-new creations in color and monochrome photos. As 1955 may have been a peak year for the number of sporting makes on sale in the US, you'll find chapters on etceterini like the Siata, exotics like the 4-cam V8 Pegaso from Spain, and on the Chrysler-powered Cunningham from Florida, which was then in its last year.
The Sports Car Pocketbook, by Britain's WIlliam Boddy in 1961, proved to be a bountiful source of info on everything from the cyclecars of the Teens and Twenties to upper crust esoterica like the Brough Superior and the Lammas Graham, as well as cars considered modern at the dawn of the Sixties. Specs. were provided for key models of each make, but the author had a special love for obscure club racers. If you want to know how to tell a Senechal from a Salmson, Boddy's your man.
In The Great Cars from 1967, Ralph Stein wrote something that was almost as much a memoir of a life spent chasing classic cars as it was a depiction of the cars themselves. The depiction, though, was pretty riveting for a high school kid, including recollections of encounters with France's exotic Talbot-Lago, arcane English machinery like the Invicta and Frazer Nash, and better-known classics from Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz. The pages are splashed with color photos by Tom Burnside, as well as historic monochrome shots from races that were already decades in the past.
The Cruel Sport covered an especially hazardous time in Formula 1 racing, when a driver's chances of survival were said to be not all that much better than in trench warfare. Robert Daley created text and monochrome photos depicting the drivers, machines, factories and races that made the world of Grand Prix racing from 1959 through 1963, and later expanded to book to include the period through 1967, after the 3 liter cars had taken over from the 1.5 liter formula of 1961-'65. It's stunning to page through this book and reflect that rollover protection was only introduced in F1 cars in the mid-Sixties, that seat belts were not required equipment until 1972, and to realize how many of these drivers were gone a few years after the original publication date.
In All My Races from 2009, Stirling Moss recalls details of all his races from the first, a victory in the Cullen Cup in a prewar BMW 328 on March 2 1947, to the last (race #585), when the driver who later became Sir Stirling crashed Rob Walker's Lotus 18/21 at Goodwood's Glover Trophy on April 23, 1962, ending his racing career and nearly his life. In the intervening 15 years of race accounts, the greatest driver who never won a World Championship sheds some light on the people and machines who made the era what it was.
By the time G.N. Georgano released A History of Sports Cars in 1970, there was plenty of history ot recount, at a time when the freewheeling, innovative attitude that led to everything from the spindly voiturettes of the Twenties to the wild Lamborghini Miura of 1967, with its transverse mid-mounted V12 sharing its crankcase oil with the transmission, was about to give way to a world of safety regulations and environmental concerns. Georgano documented the history with chapters covering Emergence through the Twenties, Thirties, Post War Recovery and Today (the Sixties), with a nation-by-nation treatment. The text is supplemented by monochrome and color photos, with coverage of specialist car makers as well as major producers, and the engineers and designers behind the ideas in what we can now see as a kind of golden age.
Historians Richard Langworth and Graham Robson released their revised edition of their Complete Book of Collectible Cars in 1987, extending the scope to include cars built as early as 1930; the first version had started with 1940, and thus missed a herd of classics. It includes US as well as European makes, and is pretty complete, but because the writers focused on their idea of production cars, you won't find an OSCA or Gordini* in here. For some reason, Bugatti and Delahaye are included, but not Talbot-Lago. And while the Datsun Z is in here, the Toyota 2000GT (already a collectible in the Eighties) is not, nor is the Honda S600/800 series. Still, it's remarkable how many times one finds oneself going to this book for production figures and dates, engine sizes, wheelbases and weights.
Beyond the cars, this blog explores the architecture and cityscapes of the automotive era, and urbanists have written thoughtful studies of these as the present century approached. As this is an election year when voters are considering (one hopes) serious questions of history and public policy, it might not be a bad moment to put in a plug for James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, from 1994, and his more hopeful Home from Nowhere from 4 years later. The first book details how the postwar growth of US suburbs led to placeless expanses of shopping malls and parking lots, old neighborhoods sliced up by freeways, and cities strangled by gridlock, and the second book explores how we might take steps to make our living places friendlier to each other and to the ecology of the only planet we know supports life...
*Errata: Owing the the uninvited and annoying interference of AutoSpell, "Gordini" was changed to "Gordon" without my noticing. Wrong. Britain's Gordon-Keeble was included in Langworth's book, while the French Gordini sports racers from the Fifties were not.
No comments:
Post a Comment