Welcome to The Department Of Past Issues. I started this because it combines both my love for writing and my affinity for automotive literature, primarily past issues of “Buff Books,” the magazines that were so very popular in the twentieth century, the means by which car news and culture was transmitted. Not instantaneously, like today, but with lead times and deadlines and postage costs, as opposed to cable or internet access fees.
The waning days of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the transition from a livestock based system of individual transport to externally and internally powered means of getting around. Of course writers, seeing an opening to scribble about something new, seized on the opportunity, and the automotive press was born.
Here in the U.S., it was The Horseless Age, which became The Automobile in 1909, then changed to Automotive Industries in 1917, which it has kept to this day. In Britain, it was, and is The Autocar, with ‘the’ being dropped in 1962. Both of those venerable publications were founded in 1895.
To know something about the cars is also to know something aboout the man.
L.J.K. Setright, from the introduction to “The Designers.”
But, we’re not here to speak of those publications- much. I grew up devouring the popular American magazines, Car & Driver, Road &Track, as well as Hot Rod, Car Craft, and some of the more exotic British titles, and sundry others.
Have I mentioned the hardcover books yet? Lurking in the stacks of the libraries of my 70’s and 80’s youth were some amazing books, filled with illustrations, called Plates, photos of the subject vehicles and personalities that the text discussed. If you’re wondering what this place is about, that’s part of it. But books, mostly, and cars. And books about cars. And magazines about cars, and because this is the 21st century, websites about cars.
Cars.
The Department Of Past Issues 