Books: Cars of the Fabulous 50s, Sizzling 60s, etc...?

Cafe Society
1

I put books in the title so passersby won’t think it’s a car-style discussion thread.

About 10 years a neat series of books by the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide (sometimes co-edited by James Flammang) was produced covering the US auto manfacturers output over the given title decade - each chapter covers one year of the decade, displaying the various manfacturers in alphabetical order (e.g for 1948 you have Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Kaiser, Nash, Packard, Studebaker and Minor Makes/Imports). They did a pretty good job of getting at least one image or picture of each make & model for each year, plus they threw in vintage ads, auto & traffic related images, pop culture references, production info and pricing, and at the beginning of each chapter a 2 page blurb on the events that occured during the year covered. Oh yes, the books also come with nice, shiny metallic dust covers :stuck_out_tongue:

I have 5 books in the series:
Cars of the Classic '30s (Grey Cover)
Cars of the Fascinating '40s (Green Cover)
Cars of the Fabulous '50s (Blue Cover)
Cars of the Sizzling '60s* (Silver Cover)
Cars of the Sensational '70s ** (Red/Purple Cover)

Questions

  1. Are there any other offical books in this series - Google just chuckles at the idea, and since the series is copyrighted 2000 obviously there was no “Cars of the So-So '00s” at the time.
  2. If mpt. were any other such books planned - IMO the 1920s would have been great, the 1910s perhaps a little too difficult to relate to. OTOH, the 1980s…eh, although they did do a pretty fair job even with the late 1970s chapters, considering that was not US Automotive history’s finest hour.
  • This book seems to be in every warehouse, repair shop, rebuilder etc I have visited.
    ** This book, on the other hand, seems surprisingly hard to find - took a while to find a reasonably price second-hand one on Amazon - the other four I own I picked up at B&N at a discount price. I guess maybe they didn’t print as many because of the 1970s topic?
2

I’ve got one that I use for research: (New Complete Book of) Collectible Cars 1930-90 by Richard M. Langworth. It’s been very handy.

3

Bought my brother a book called “Lemons” that featured crappy post-war cars.

“Hey, I’ve owned most of these cars!”

“I know, and you will buy the rest. You are doomed to buy crappy cars for their romance.” As if an Opel Kadett was ever romantic.

Getting my 1990 Crown Vic insulted for its paint AT NIGHT shows that Ford hadn’t worked out the problem described in the book, 15 years later.