Car Design News - Design Books

There have been many Georgano’s – the other name for the most complete passenger car encyclopedia in existence. It originated from ”Doyle’s” a tiny book listing names and adresses of all known motor car manufacturers, first published privately by George Ralph Doyle in the thirties.

Then Nick Georgano, noted historian, took over and expanded the slender volume into a huge, illustrated encyclopedia, with potted histories of all the different manufacturers. My first ”The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars” is dated 1968. New editions have come after that, and they have grown from the 640 pages in the 1968 version to nearly 1800 pages divided into two volumes of the 2000 edition.

But for his latest edition Nick Georgano initiated another pioneering work which resulted in a companion volume: ”The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile: Coachbuilding”. A groundbreaking work, done with the help of nine different contributors from around the world.

The book starts with some 50 pages of the history of coachbuilding, a good enough overview to whet the apetite for more. And then you get the encyclopedia part where some 350 pages are devoted to individual coachbuilding companies. It must be more than a thousand companies in there.

It would be wrong to criticize anything, because we have never had anything remotely like this before. But for the next edition may I express a hope for a more international bias? The illustrations are mostly from the archives of the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu and when the engaging writer Nick Walker (who has written the ”A-Z of British Coachbuilding, covering some 250 companies) contributes the installments tend to become very British. I hade trouble understanding why Hooper deserves more space than Italdesign or double that of Karmann.

But ideally all subjects should be treated in the same way as the – even fairly insignificant – British entries. If the quality of research and re-writing for the next edition, could be at the same level as that presented by contributors Jan P. Norbye and Michael Lamm now, we would have a jewel of a book. Very readable as well as a serious research instrument.

Of course there are companies missing in this tome (who can ever make such a list ”complete”?) and the lack of index is irritating. I’d also like to see a more comprehensive literature list - when you are asked to look at Automobile Revue 1972 for a certain subject you have some work to do. That is a weekly magazine!

But no quarreling here – that the book exists at all should be a joy to all who are interested in the history of coachbuilding and car design. You will learn about brands you never heard of, techniques long forgotten, a market that does not exist any more. The best thing you could do is to buy the book (if there are still copies left) and start shouting for a new, enlarged edition. Maybe, like the Motor Car encyclopedia, we can hope for a 300 percent expansion of the work