Author Topic: Book research help - British cyclecars  (Read 14792 times)

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Offline barrett

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Book research help - British cyclecars
« on: February 03, 2024, 06:10:55 PM »
Hello all. I am currently working on what I hope will be the definitive book on the history of British cyclecars from approx. 1910-1930. I know this subject has been covered by various people in the past, but nobody has really attempted a detailed look at every single cyclecar which was built in the UK in any serious depth before. The plan is for this to be a large (very large) multi-volume book with, where possible, extremely high-quality photographs (most of which will not have been seen since the cars were new) along with ephemera, brochures, advertisements etc. If you have seen the Salvat/Fournier French cyclecar book, it will be along these lines but obviously significantly larger, as that only covers cars in the first couple of letters in the alphabet.

I have a list of almost 300 makes, and at the time of writing have completed the entries for 22 of them. I am lucky to have hard-copy files on many, many makes which include lots of original material, but there are many cars for which I have so far not been able to locate good-quality images, and others where information is very scarce. I am therefore calling on the collective knowledge of the Autopuzzles community to help me in my quest. If you have anything related to British cyclecars of this period, I would love to hear from you. Naturally, the most famous makes are well-covered (I have countless GWK, Carden and GN photos for example), but for the really unknown stuff I would welcome any scrap, however small.

I will say that if something appears online, then I have probably already seen it. What I'm looking for is period material on cars which has not been transferred to the World Wide Web. Whilst I'm focussing on 'production' cars (or at least those for which production was considered), I'm also including a section on home-mades and one-offs, so I'd love to see anything about those, too.

I have a website which contains a list of (most of) the makes I'm planning to cover. I'd love it if you could take a look and browse the list, and see if you have anything in your files which might be of use to me. I have a dedicated email set up so please get in touch that way.

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