Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Gotta shop? Got no ideas for a couple guys on your list? You could throw down for that fake fish that sings when you push a button. You could buy a wall clock shaped like a car. Another hat? Those items might be used, might be appreciated, might get re-gifted.

What about a car book? If the text in interesting and the pictures are good, it’s a nice thing for any car enthusiast to thumb through and read, bit by bit or all at once. And once you’ve got from it what you want, you can put it on the shelf and pull it down again later. A book never becomes clutter; it becomes part of your library and remains a reference and a source for ideas and inspiration.

Here are five readily available books any car enthusiast is likely to enjoy.

1) Dream Garages. Features 21 profiles of garages (in the US, England and Italy), the collections they contain and the owners behind them. Photos are by top automotive snappers like Peter Vincent, James Mann, Robert Genat and Dave Gooley. Favorite car and motorcycle author Peter Egan wrote the forward and I can vouch for the text because I wrote it–and because it’s been a bestseller for Motorbooks, the world’s largest car book publisher. :^)

2) The Cobra in the Barn. Tom Cotter’s breakthrough “barn-find” book recounting tales of rare and wonderful cars “discovered” in barns and garages and often snapped up by the lucky finder.

3) The Hemi in the Barn. The follow-on to Cobra in the Barn, with stories just as interesting and cars just as rare. America’s best known car enthusiast, Jay Leno, penned the intro on this one and one of the great finds ever–Leno’s discovery of the legendary Duesenberg sitting in a Manhattan parking garage for seventy years–is included.

4) Cannonball: World’s Greatest Outlaw Road Race. Although several years old now, Brock Yates’ stories and photos of this, er, unsanctioned dash across the United States–which spawned the movies Gumball Rally and Cannonball Run–is worth every penny.

5) McQueen’s Machines. If you think Steve McQueen was cool and are curious about what cars he actually owned and drove in his personal life–along with many bikes–this book by his son Chad has the inside story and photos. Good stuff.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Car stories, Motorcycle tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.