Sir Joseph Whitworth

by Norman Atkinson
You know the name even if you don’t think you do. The British Standard Whitworth system codified an accepted standard for screw threads. He did many more things, in his field and as a man—and he deserves to be better known!
The Fastest Woman on Wheels, The Life of Paula Murphy

by Erik Arneson
Skates–sailboat–horse: if it moves, let’s see if it can move faster. She came to motorsports only in her thirties and then almost by accident, but it stuck and she was good with anything she drove. But she almost missed this biography, dying just a few months later.
Duchamp, A Biography

by Calvin Tomkins
The guy who displayed a urinal at an art gallery opening? The righteous godfather of postmodernism in the visual arts? The quintessential enigmatic artist? Yep, it’s Marcel Duchamp and here’s his story!
Maserati 450S: A Bazooka from Modena

by Walter Bäumer and Jean-François Blachette
Super expensive, hard to handle, engine power that overwhelmed the chassis, sexy Fantuzzi coachwork. Built to suit the upcoming racing regs it became obsolete a few years later when they changed. So few were made you may never see—or hear, a real treat—one.
We Were the Ramchargers: Inside Drag Racing’s Legendary Team, 2nd Ed.

by Dave Rockwell
Passionate auto engineers don’t leave their day jobs behind in their free time but few went as deep into pro motorsports as this bunch of Chrysler engineers. The author, a Ramcharger himself, interviewed more than 40 team members, competitors, and track operators.
Happy Lucky Days – My Life in Racing

by Bob Evans
Racing in the the glory days of F5000, Evans showed plenty of talent but as his entertaining and candid autobiography shows, scoring points and wins has a lot to do with factors outside a driver’s control.
Road Hogs

Detroit’s Big, Beautiful Luxury Performance Cars of the 1960s and 1970s
by Eric Peters
The combination of book title and cover photo—a car so big it spills off the page—is clever! Author Peters refers, rightly, to the big cars of those years as “totems of a different America” and his book as “a funeral dirge.”
Ed Pink, The Old Master

by Ed Pink with Bones Bourcier
There was a time, before crew chiefs, when engine builders were as famous as the star drivers because they saw to every aspect of a car’s performance. Having built thousands of engines, at 92, Pink has finally called it quits.
Flying and Preserving Historic Aircraft, The Memoirs of David Ogilvy

by David Ogilvy
Can’t tell roll from bank? Ever put a fuel-soaked rag into your carb intake to encourage combustion? Ever piloted a 1910 triplane, or the first British jet? Ogilvy’s highly polished prose will transport you into the cockpit.
Baillon Collection

by Rémi Dargegen
Looked at one car at a time, the Baillon Collection is interesting enough but it is the unique circumstances of it being found and brought to market that will forever make it the “find of the century.”
The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century

by Kassia St. Clair
Automobiles, electric lights, wireless telegraphy, the first synthetic plastic—everything is changing all at once. Ironic: The 8000-mile drive in 1907 from Peking to Paris happened at the same time newspapers touted “the triumph of the horse.”
Airway to the East 1918–1920 and the Collapse of No.1 Aerial Route RAF

by Clive Semple
The Arab-Israeli conflict is in the news every day. This book revisits a story related to it but buried since 1919 and deals with early long-distance flying in general.