A couple of considerations about the "Italian Carrozzieri" book, beacuse your feedbacks are always very useful..
For sure it will be impossible to cover in one book all the different cars coachbuilt and styled in Italy. I already did it for Fiat cars and I've published so far 12 books and covered less then a half of the different base-models.
What I will do is something similar to Georgano's Beaulieu Encyclpaedia in terms of layout and approach.
I'm planning to include a short story of each brand and illustrate it with some sample pictures (maybe 1 or 2 for the minor ones, maybe 30 or 50 for Bertone and Pininfarina).
Also, I'm planning to have a "car-oriented" approach in the brand selection: coachbuilders that made racing-cars, passenger-cars, minivan, car-based ambulances and hearses, but not truck, buses or military vehicles.
Do you think I'm in the right direction?
To reach an as large as possible audience, this will indeed be the correct and most logic approach.
The 2 biggest setbacks about the Beaulieu for me are:
A lot of coachbuilders are missing, so be as complete as possible
The Beaulieu works with a ‘main list’ and a ‘supplementary list’ which makes it harder to find something back, so work with only 1 list.
From all of your books, this is the one that needs English text absolutely the most. So I hope that it will be foreseen.
What I would add is a map of Italy, with a detailed shot of Turin (and possibly Milan) that indicates where the carrozzieri were located (although some of the carrozzieri moved a couple of times so I have not figured out yet how to cope with that on the map.
I would also add a list (including some basic info) of the important men behind the Italian coachbuilding industry. And not only Italian ones but for example also Dany Brawand, Tom Tjaarda,…
And a timeline summary that gives a clear overview of when the companies were active.
When reading about carrozzieri, I have always the impression that everybody knew everybody and that they all worked together.
The problem is that the ‘complete picture’ is always missing so what I also would love to see (although I don’t know how to do it) is an overview with the links between the different companies/people
All the above mentioned suggestions can maybe be combined in 1 general chapter.
Obviously, because this is the concept of an encyclopedia, the most important companies like Pininfarina and Bertone will get the biggest attention (with their most famous creations).
But for us ‘experts’, there is already enough information available on the market about these big ones and their big successes. We (or at least me) are in particular looking for more information about the ‘small’ ones (and that is relative because even about a giant like Vignale, little to nothing has been published). And concerning the big ones, I’m looking for more information about their lesser known creations like the 1956 DKW Pininfarina, 1978 Autobianchi A 112 Zagato,…
But I think that this might be the theme for yet another book called something like ‘The forgotten and unsuccessful creations of the Italian Carrozzieri’.
As always I’m fully prepared to help where I can!
