The Best of Car Magazine: The 60s and 70s

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Editorial reviews

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd November 2007
"The interest this book generates at any gathering is amazing, and no self-respecting petrolhead's Santa stocking should be without one."

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The Times Magazine, 1 December 2007
"If you're looking for a bit of DCI Gene Hunt nostalgia, this compendium is packed with cars in metallic browns with vinyl seats, big ashtrays and not a side-impact bar in sight."

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Synopsis
For more than a century the love of cars fast and slow, flashy and frumpy, has been an obsession around the world. "Car Magazine" in the 1960s and 70s was the British bible for petrol heads and speed freaks: packed with fast, shiny cars speeding along noble country roads, lots of diagrams, bikini-clad dolly birds buffing up the paintwork and classic journalism, such as Stirling Moss' Grand Prixview of 1965. "The Best of Car: The 60s and 70s" is a cracking piece of automotive nostalgia, harking back to the days when cars were solid, beloved, chrome-bejewelled works of art that often won more care and attention than 'er indoors. It's time to don the sheepskin car coat and head out for a run down memory lane.

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-07-16 rating:
Not quite the best of Car, but still a good compilation
A wonderful compilation from the early days of Car, showing, if anything, the gulf between some of the lazy modern motoring journalism and the skilful writing of the past. I was a Car reader from 1981, so I missed this formative era, and while there are questionable articles (e.g. the off-roader tests, which seem more disorganized than some of today's work) there is some great stuff as well (anything by L. J. K. Setright, Jerry Sloniger on Butzi Porsche, stories on Sochiro Honda and what might happen if we run out of oil).

I disagree with the earlier one-out-of-five reviewer about `seventh-generation'-photocopy quality: while it's obvious these are (professional) scans, the quality is acceptable, though of course, they are of magazine pages that are, in some cases, over 40 years old. A mark off for the cropping, since paper sizes have changed since the 1960s and 1970s. Some type will be a strain by modern standards, showing how far magazine layout has come (on that note, the typography on my edition's cover differs slightly from the Amazon image, with ITC Benguiat in place of News Gothic). Some old advertisements are included, for that full retro feel.

I'll hold back from giving this a five out of five--it doesn't really chart the development of the motor car fairly and has a tad too much on exotica--but as compilations go, it's far from being the worst.


review by: date: 2008-06-30 rating:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of CAR...
Okay, it is probably an age thing - my age thing - but this is far from the best of CAR.

Instead of loads of nice pictures of Ferraris in Italy, stories about driving to Germany and back to test a new Porsche, endless pastel coloured renderings of future models (a style that made even the Maestro look sexy) what we have here is grainy text that looks like a 7th generation photocopy and dodgy shots of women who thought the box art for the game Mastermind was a fashion bible.

CAR, at least the CAR of my memory, was selling dreams. This is just a 70's nostalgia cash-in too far.

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