By Brandes Elitch
Collecting Automotive Books and Literature
In 1982, a British book dealer named Charles Mortimer published a book called The Constant Search, Collecting Motoring and Motorcycling Books. Mortimer started his business during WWII, and spent half a century doing research for this book. At the time, he believed he had chronicled, in 40 different categories, everything published to that date on this subject. In addition to this bibliography, he included chapters on how to start a collection, whether to specialize or not, and how to store and display printed material. Mortimer started at the dawn of the automotive age, so this was an ambitious project. Today, I wonder if it would even be possible to chronicle all the published material on this subject in just the last 30 years. There weren’t a lot of new books about what we call “automobilia” in the sixties and seventies, but starting perhaps 20 years ago there has been a veritable explosion in published material. In this brief article, I would like to touch on some interesting aspects of automotive journalism and book collecting for the car enthusiast. My sense is that almost every car collector has also built up a book, periodical, manual, and literature collection, at least that has been my experience. [Read more…] about The Constant Search, Part 1