The Crittenden Automotive Library

Tail Lights: March 1, 2014

Opinions expressed by Bill Crittenden are not official policies or positions of The Crittenden Automotive Library. You can read more about the Library's goals, mission, policies, and operations on the About Us page.

Volume 3, Issue 3
No Way to Get Bored...

Bill Crittenden
March 1, 2014

The Lamborghini Veneno at the 2013 Geneva International Motor Show, CC-BY-3.0 photo by Norbert Aepli, Switzerland.

Since the last update (quite a few weeks ago, so there's a LOT of new stuff this issue) the Library now includes all of the New York Times articles I could find in the May 1900 and December 1922 sections of their archives, a huge batch of articles transcribed from image file to searchable, copy & paste-ready text.

I've also added a bunch of pictures from the 2013 Geneva International Motor Show, including pictures from a large number of cars completely new to the Library, including the Giugiaro Brivido, Pagani Huayra, and McLaren P1. You just don't see those around here, so I have to thank Norbert Aepli of Switzerland for the Creative Commons-licensed photographs. About 100 are online now, with over 300 to go from 2013, as well as more from previous years' shows!

Dead Trees

Progress has been made on putting all the papers, clippings, and miscellaneous sheets of stuff into organized binders for reference. Once this project draws to a close, I'll be ready to go through them and add what I can to the Library. Some of the material is already online, a little preview can be seen on the Toyota Mark II page.

New additions to the Reference Desk include:
1982 Buick Skyhawk Service Manual
Standard Catalog of Thunderbird 1955-2004
1987 Nissan Sentra Service Manual
Celica & Supra: the book of Toyota's sports coupés
General Repair Manuals:
Chilton 1971-1978
Motor 1977-1982
Popular Mechanics 1st Ed 1969-1976

Of these, the Popular Mechanics manual and the Buick book may be out of copyright, after double-checking they'll be put in the queue to go online for all to read & refer to!

History Beyond the Fenders

This week's History Beyond the Fenders entries are assorted articles from the collection of The New York Times of December 1922. In addition to traditional automotive news, there were daily reports of the carnage drivers inflicted upon the city of New York, stories about Henry Ford's dealings in railroads and coal mines to support his company's huge factories, Henry Ford's celebrity both at home (where a woman married a man because of a supposed family tie to Henry Ford and tried to have him killed when the lie was exposed) and abroad (Adolf Hitler was reportedly a big fan of Mr. Ford), the construction of the Holland Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey by roadway under the Hudson River, and Henry Ford's connections to politics in Muscle Shoals and Senator James Couzens.

Henry Ford is definitely the star of this huge batch of articles!

Progress in 2014

I've been a bit busy to do a recount of document pages with new additions, but the first new videos of 2014 have just gone online, with plenty more to come from a great new Creative Commons-licensed source!

In the absence of numbers, I'll show just how wide 0the variety of topics covered by The Crittenden Automotive Library is. I put together a sample based on Twitter posts, and here's what I came up with:
Model car club newsletters
Datsun/Nissan/Infiniti clippings
BMW Z4 photos
1895-2014 patents
Toyota clippings
1982 Buick Skyhawk manual
2014 Chevy Silverado/GMC Sierra
Inter-vehicle communication
2013 Geneva Motor Show pictures
NASCAR (Danica Patrick)
World War I Taxi
1900 & 1922 newspaper articles
Car dealership management videos
1903 Oldsmobile ad
1970's repair manuals (RefDesk)
Toyota Celica/Supra book (RefDesk)
1987 Nissan Sentra book (RefDesk)
Ford T-bird 1955-2004 (RefDesk)
PCSA drag racing

In addition to this list, I also finally created the Subject grouping for military vehicles.

Of course, just because it's not on the list doesn't mean it's not covered. That's just what's come across my desk in the past few weeks. We're happy to cover drifting, supercars, Formula 1, muddin', lowriders, car songs, trucking, Top Gear, crash tests, cruise nights...

There's just so much variety in the automotive world, there's just no way to get bored learning about it!

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is an online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 498,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 18,500 individual articles, more than a week of video and two weeks of audio, more than 22,000 photographs & other images, and a Reference Desk with over 90 book volumes and thousands of advertising brochures & documents kept available for the information they contain but can't be copied into the online Library for sharing due to copyright.

Tail Lights: March 1, 2014