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1986 Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot Award Winner

The Marmon Heritage
by George Philip & Stacey Pankiw Hanley

This is the best of books. This is the worst of books. First, the “best” part: The authors detail the leadership and product evolution of the Nordyke & Marmon Company from 1851. This gives a rare inside look at how a top-200 American company morphs from 1851 global flour mill equipment business to 1902–1933 premier US auto manufacturer to important World War Two military-industrial complex member, then back into civilian transportation with trucks and busses, mining equipment, rail cars, all the while adroitly changing with the times until today the company is privately held and renamed Marmon Group (130 global business units, owned by Berkshire Hathaway of Warren Buffett fame). In short, Marmon started big, and still is.

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1991 SAH Award of Distinction

Tatra: The Legacy of Hans Ledwinka
by Ivan Margolius & John G Henry

Who actually designed the original air-cooled volkswagen? Was it Ferdinand Porsche, or was it a Tatra creation appropriated by the Nazis? This book gives you the Tatra side of the story. It also gives you an incredible look into the design mind of Hans Ledwinka, chief designer for Czechoslovakia’s Tatra, a car, truck, aircraft, and railcar manufacturer founded in 1850. Tatra built its first car in 1897, and is still in business today making trucks.

Without a doubt, Hans Ledwinka (1878−1967) ranks right up there with any of the early mechanical innovators who designed/invented all the basic car/truck/aero gas engine and chassis variations still with us today. Swinging half-axles, air-cooling, rear engines, backbone frame chassis, mono-block engines/transmissions, and the serial production of streamlined, low Cd monocoque−bodied cars were all design elements utilized and refined by Ledwinka.

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The Automobiles of the Maharajas
by Manvendra Singh Barwani and Sharada
Dwivedi

The book’s handsome presentation, with its copper-toned, deeply embossed dust jacket that protects the finely-textured fabric over the hardcovers, makes it virtually impossible to resist looking inside. The title, The Automobiles of the Maharajas, gives you an indication that you are about to be transported. Opening the book, your eye is treated to ivory and copper-tones on the pages that feature clear, well-reproduced photos of scenes exotic and intriguing to the Westerner.

Fellow SpeedReaders.info reviewer Sabu Advani observed, in his review of this book in the magazine he edits for the Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club that, “The photos beg to be savored not just in terms of the cars but the glimpses they provide into a different society (that is) at an entirely different level of industrialization. As an account of the cars that went to India the book stands alone, but it is much more than just a car book.”

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Sports Cars of the Future
by Strother MacMinn

First impression is this is a modest little book (especially if comparing it to some of the multi-pound coffee table picture books). But once read, especially if reading now in the 21st century, it is virtually impossible to forget. It is more than what is printed on the pages of Sports Cars of the Future. It is the realization of when it was written—in the latter part of the 1950s—and by whom, that simply stuns the thinking reader today.

Strother MacMinn was the embodiment of the descriptor “car-guy”. His abilities were such that he was hired straight from high school by GM’s Art & Colour section then headed by Harley Earl. By the time he wrote and illustrated this book, MacMinn had determined after spending several years employed in the corporate world, that he wanted to continue working as a designer, but independently. Returning to his native California, he found consulting projects with a number of clients including Henry Dreyfuss and began, what would become a 50-year parallel career, teaching automotive design at Art Center.

The prescience of MacMinn’s writings is startling. Ostensibly the book is about sports cars. But the cars, those real as well as those he hypothesizes for the future, are the ones that are today, a half century later, the most revered. Thus it is the principles beyond the specific, individual cars that form the overriding value of the book; design and engineering concepts that have been proven timeless due in part to the respect they demonstrate for the unchanging realities of nature’s laws.

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Autos 1900-1905 and Autos 1906-1912
by Ted W and Mitch Mayborn

Historians engaged in research often retreat to the microfiche, or still older files and boxes of period papers and publications that are housed in museums and libraries. Gradually too, some of the contents of these newspapers and magazines are making their way on-line. By examining these period printings, one gains knowledge not only of specific subjects or products and also a sense, an awareness, of the times. A careful researcher reads and looks at everything, the articles as well as the advertisements. And, occasionally someone with collections of original material assembles and publishes books or booklets that are in some way “themed”. Such is the case with these two, Autos 1900-1905 and Autos 1906-1912.

But there is a bit more prompting this review here and now. Both of these little books were assembled and printed in 1972. And, while both have long been out-of-print, a recently discovered box of new-old, never-before-in-circulation stock of both of these two books makes it possible for them to be sold brand new again for as long as there is supply. So, depending upon when you discover and are reading these words, there may still be some new-old stock available. Otherwise you’ll find it necessary to search the secondary market for these two, as well as the other Mayborn-books if you’re trying to assemble entire sets.

The entire set would be an even dozen of these 6” x 9” softbound 48-page books, published in three series. Series I contained one book each on Studebaker, Packard, Lincoln and Buick. Series II were the two books reviewed here plus Autos of Roaring 20s and Autos of the Thirties. Series III was comprised of Thunderbird, Hudson, Mustang and The Last Years of Studebaker.

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