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Bentley’s Great Eight
The Astonishing 50-Year Saga of one of History’s Greatest V8 Engines
by Karl Ludvigsen

Bentley’s Great Eight? Wait a minute; I thought that was a Rolls-Royce V8 engine! That title is not going to go down well with Rolls-Royce enthusiasts. Since the publisher of SpeedReaders, Sabu Advani, is the editor of the US Rolls-Royce/Bentley magazine and was a contributor to the book in question, we asked him to explain:

“For much of their lives, Bentley and Rolls-Royce were one and the same company. Obviously author Karl Ludvigsen is aware of that and the omission of the Rolls-Royce name from the title is not an oversight but due to a complicated trademark issue that is not yet fully settled. For all practical purposes, when VW Group acquired the company it became the SOLE owner of ALL physical and intellectual assets and retained them even as it later divested itself of the Rolls-Royce part of the business (to BMW). In legal terms, the history of the engine—an intellectual asset—is thus solely a Bentley property. And so it goes throughout the book; while Rolls-Royce is very much a part of the story, the emphasis throughout is on Bentley. But, it is safe to assume anyone with an interest in reading a technical history of the Crewe V8 engine will be cognizant of the complexities of the name game.” (Also see Comment section.)

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The Cars of Pullman
by Joe Welsh, Bill Howes, Kevin J Holland

Hotels on wheels—incorporated in 1867 as the Pullman Palace Car Company, New York cabinetmaker George Mortimer Pullman’s eponymous railroad cars crisscrossed North America for 102 years. They became a household word, so much so that especially sleeping cars were often generically referred to as Pullmans regardless of who made or ran them. Entire trains, if their owners could afford it, boasted they were “all-Pullman”—sleeper, lounge, parlor, restaurant, and observation cars (later also freight cars). In its heyday more than 100,000 people a night found a place to bed down en route, all thanks to George Pullman’s own disappointment—and discomfort—at having to spend one night too many sleeping in his seat on a train trip.

Talk about having the right idea at the right time: in the 40 years following the company’s founding, railroad track mileage grew from 39,000 to 229,000 miles.

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100 Years of Flight:
A Chronicle of Aerospace History, 1903–2003
by Frank H Winter & F Robert van der Linden

Published by the two most prestigious institutions in the field, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM), this compendium chronicles in timeline fashion the century of endeavor since the Wright Brothers’ first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. The book lists the high points of those hundred years, in other words the authors exercised judgment as to which of the thousands of candidates constitute the “most significant, illustrative [and] interesting” events and were deserving of inclusion here. The guiding principle is to show continuity of progress, and trends. This is the same methodology the authors applied in over 30 years of writing the monthly “Out of the Past” column in the AIAA journal Aerospace America (before 1984 Astronautics & Aeronautics) from which the bulk of this book is drawn. Author Winter was on staff at the NASM and became the column’s principal editor, later joined by van der Linden as coeditor; the former is now Curator of Rocketry and the latter Curator of Air Transportation and Special Purpose Aircraft.

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American Cars, 1946 to 1959
American Cars, 1960 to 1972
by J. “Kelly” Flory, Jr.

Kelly Flory’s life is awash in numbers about cars. His dedication to gathering encyclopedic detail about every car sold between 1946 and 1972 is evident in these two 1,000-page (each!) books, American Cars, 1960 to 1972, published in 2004, and his newer (but chronologically first) American Cars, 1946 to 1959, published in 2008 (both already reprinted once). No bit of information is too small, and none has been overlooked. But, lest anyone should be confused as to what is and is not covered by these books, note the fine print: “. . . “all cars offered for sale in the United States by major American manufacturers . . .” In other words, certain categories fall outside the scope of these books: while an independent such as, say, Crosley is included, a low-volume make such as, say, Tucker, is excluded.

Flory, of Lenexa, Kan., is a car enthusiast extraordinaire. He started collecting automotive literature when he was 10 or 12 years old. He worked for Kay-Bee Toys in high school and continued there for 16 years, in part because it gave him access to models. His collection of more than 5,000 models contains boxes of Hot Wheels cars, plastic models, and die cast metal cars.

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Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899–1908
and
Coast to Coast Auto Races of the Early 1900s: Three Contests That Changed the World
by Curt McConnell

Historian McConnell, a journalist by trade, feels that just like Lewis and Clark who blazed the trail from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and are revered for it to this day, so the autoists of the Pioneer Period deserve tribute. More than track races, hill climbs, or even the AAA’s Glidden Tours (1905–14), it was the long-distance transcontinental drives that demonstrated the car’s unique potential as durable, versatile transport. Although there is no argument about the validity of this point there had been little written about the trips in the way of an organized account until McConnell put pen to paper. He argues that historians have failed to examine the impact of transcontinental trips because the very plentitude of scattered and often inexact period newspaper reports and other snippets made the research too difficult and time-consuming.

Published within a month of each other and similar in scope and approach, McConnell’s books overlap chronologically but without duplicating contents. The first book deals with eight endurance trips whereas the second book explores three competitive long-distance contests, hence the word race in the title.

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Maserati 300S
by Walter Bäumer

Hard to imagine that there’s a living to be made being a full-time Maserati historian but that’s just what German photographer (mostly fashion) and car enthusiast Walter Bäumer decided to do in 2003. Incidentally, he also is the editor of the German Maserati Club’s excellent magazine Der Dreizack (The Trident).

Supremely beautiful and possibly the best all around sport racing car of the 1950s—if the votes of the likes of a Moss, Fangio, or Behra matter—the fabled Vittorio Bellantrani-engineered Maserati 300S of which only 26 copies were built between1955–1959 caught Bäumer’s eye in the 1990s when in an idle moment he picked up a long-forgotten Maserati book in his library.

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Flying the SR-71 Blackbird: In the Cockpit on a Secret Operational Mission
by Col. Richard H. Graham

As aircraft historian Jay Miller rightly says in his Foreword, this book is the “missing link” in the existing literature on the Blackbird, “arguably the most significant aircraft of our time.” At the book’s core are detailed descriptions of the actual step-by-step procedures the pilot and his backseater would apply, in fact this book is the first to reproduce the actual Abbreviated Pilot’s Checklist (there is a separate one for the Reconnaissance Systems Officer/RSO in the rear cockpit). This is excerpted from the original flight manual that runs to over 1000 pages and, needless to say, was highly classified until the 1990s. While this sort of virtual tour of an SR-71 may be of special appeal to pilots or to fans of the Blackbird who devour every morsel of information, there’s more to this book than airmanship. Graham was not only an SR-71 pilot and instructor (1974–1981) with 756 Blackbird hours, he was later also the commander of the squadron (9th SRW) that had responsibility for worldwide U-2 and SR-71 operations and all the related support hardware. So, on the one hand he can describe every single switch on the plane and on the other speak to the bigger picture such as the difference between “spying” and “overt intel gathering” and cite specific examples of SR-71 missions changing word history. To the person not used to thinking of such matters, the complexity of issues such as overflights (incidentally, Graham is adamant that the landmasses of the USSR and China were never overflown post-U2) and landing rights on foreign soil or the risk/benefit analysis in deploying a Blackbird will make for fascinating reading.

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Ferrari by Mailander 

by Karl Ludvigsen

By producing this seemingly cost-no-object book, Dalton Watson Fine Books has gone out on a literary limb for Ferrari enthusiasts and is betting that their target audience is astute enough to appreciate great photography, outstanding layout, superb photo selection and willing enough to chuck out $125 for the privilege of ownership. There are few better deals out there. Think of the book as a multiple picture frame that presents art, history, and an era never to return—a portable fine art museum of early Ferrari history. It is books like this that demonstrate why the Internet won’t replace them anytime soon.

This is an important book, and one of the best from the Ludvigsen Library. Rodolfo Mailander’s epic photo collection covers only the years 1950–1955 but these are the years that forged Ferrari’s name and reputation, and any new work involving that formative era is heartily welcome.

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A Century of Carrier Aviation:
The Evolution of Ships and Shipborne Aircraft
by David Hobbs

Naval Aviators have a reputation for thinking they’re the cat’s meow. The lay reader can easily enough relate to such obvious difficulties as pilots having to find a tiny and constantly moving runway in pitch-black darkness but have you ever considered how hot funnel gases from the carrier’s engines interacting with cold ambient sea air create turbulence in the path of an approaching plane that is already almost at stall speed while trying to line up with a flight deck that is pitching up and down and side to side? or how the forward speed of the carrier combined with the wind speed affect a plane’s payload and take-off run? Ah, nothing is simple . . .

This large-format book sheds light on these and a hundred other details of the unique challenges posed by environment and hardware.

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The Roycean:
From Manchester to Crewe, via Derby

The Roycean is a new annual journal containing scholarly articles on the history of Rolls-Royce and (Derby- and Crewe-built) Bentley motorcars up to the 1960s, as well as articles on coachbuilders, dealers, the personalities involved with the cars, individual models of the cars made, and interesting owners. (The city names in the subtitle refer to the places at which these cars were built at various times.) The list of contributors to this inaugural issue is impressive, including marque specialists Tom Clarke, John Fasal, Will Morrison and Steve Stuckey, in addition to specialist researchers Richard Forder (who has published on coachbuilders S&P Forder and Bradburn & Wedge) and James Fack (who has published on the Hudson Terraplane, coachbuilder Atcherley, and prewar Talbot cars).

The primary purpose behind this journal was to make available specifically to a UK and European readership some of the highly focused material that had been published in specialist magazines and journals elsewhere, i.e. in the USA and Australia.

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Alpine & Renault - The Sports Prototypes Vols 1 and 2
by Roy Smith

Following his previous book Alpine & Renault: The Development of the Revolutionary Turbo F1 Car 1968–1979, Smith takes a look at a very different animal by the same maker/s in this two-volume set: the Sports Prototypes from 1963–1978. Good-looking, reliable, beloved by the French, successful even, but compared to other cars of the time not a whole lot has been written about these Alpines, certainly not in book form and most certainly not in English. Moreover, the full chassis and race history of the M63, M63B, M64, M65, A210, A211, A220, and A221 sports prototypes had never been recorded completely in any language. This, aside from Smith’s personal decades-old interest in these models and in motorsports in general, is a primary reason why he took it upon himself to put pen to paper after having retired from a professional life in sales and marketing.

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Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure:
The True Story of a Great American Road Trip
by Matthew Algeo

Road trips, and the books wherein the tales of each are told, continually attract and delight readers. First-person stories from writers like William Least-Heat Moon with his Blue Highways and John Steinbeck telling of his Travels with Charley have entertained, informed, and motivated others to go exploring.

Some, however, needed no third-party inspiration. All Harry and Bess Truman required was time. Time free from other commitments—like the presidency. However, as they discovered, once having occupied the White House as the first couple, it can be a tad difficult to go anywhere without being noticed.

Truman was a Chrysler man making his newly acquired 1953 New Yorker—a black, four-door sedan riding on chrome wire wheels dressed with whitewall tires, fitted with a 331 cubic inch FirePower V-8 that answered to its Powerflite transmission—the “star car” of this particular narrative. But others feature prominently too including Harry’s first-ever automobile, a 1911 Stafford in which he had courted Bess. (Anyone remember those machines?)

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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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The Battle of Britain
by Kate Moore

You could go broke buying every single book about the Battle of Britain, and blind reading them all. This one is easy on the wallet, easy on they eyes, and a well-rounded overview. Published just in time for the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the battle in the summer of 1940, the book’s particular appeal lies in the sensitive weaving together of individual human voices and the maelstrom of history.

Already as a university student did Moore apply her mind to the Battle of Britain and wrote her final thesis on it. Now on the editorial staff at Osprey, the publisher of this work, she revisits the subject once more in this her first book. Of note, the Imperial War Museum in London is associated with this project and its vast archives yielded many heretofore unknown or certainly unpublished sources such as private letters, logs, diaries, and photos.

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