Screen capture from the 1954 Chevrolet advertisement “Low and Behold.”

Ephemeral

I love that word. I discovered it when I found The Prelinger Archives, a project where old films that weren't meant to be preserved for a long time were digitized and uploaded to The Internet Archive. It mostly consists of training films, educational films, advertisements, newsreels, the sorts of things that were meant to be used for a short period of time and discarded. Probably the most famous is the duck-and-cover turtle film from the Cold War.

Everything printed on paper was destined to be ephemeral to some degree. Daily newspapers are rarely read past the date they're printed, flyers are fairly useless after the event, and even what's printed on modern acid-free, archival safe paper is subject to the gradual attrition of whatever limited copies were printed through damage, disposal, and fire.

That's why the phrase for something meant to be permanent is “written in stone.” Sometimes a book or document is so important that it's lovingly preserved for centuries beyond the original paper's expected lifetime, but it's the rare exception made for things like Constitutions, Gutenberg Bibles, or Shakespeare's folios. New editions are printed for public consumption while the originals are kept safe from light, physical damage, and even regular air. And new editions can continually be produced because the original still exists.

One advantage of this line of study is that nothing written about automobiles is nearly that old.

About one-fourth of the history of the automobile is in the digital age. This brings an interesting new twist on the old order.

So much more junk gets published as it has lowered the bar for publication from “anyone who can spare the money to pay a printer” to “anyone with a computer or smartphone.” Which is damn near everyone in developed countries nowadays.

But it also allows for the preservation of all kinds of works. Dissemination as well, if the works are licensed, in the public domain, or if you know where to find pirated files.

Distributing copies and moving from backup to backup as devices fail should allow these works to remain readable forever, but only provided they are archived by the kind of people who will maintain these backups.

This month has been a double whammy for recent automotive history. The first news was that Google was going to cull inactive accounts from its platforms, and at this point that seems to mean removing Blogger sites that are dependent upon Google accounts that haven't been logged in to in two or more years. Unless the folks watching this are wrong, a lot of daily life observations and citizen journalism is going to get wiped out soon.

The other is more personal. While Blogger sites aren't often licensed and are rarely public domain, PRWeb had a generous permission policy that allowed me to post a gigantic volume of press releases from the past fifteen years. This week they completed a redesign of their site and their archives are gone.

Thanks to The Internet Archive I've been able to recover a handful of the files that I hadn't yet gotten around to pulling off of PRWeb. It's not a lot compared to how many there were, but now that I can't pull any more it's time to close out that project so look for thousands of new press releases in the near future.

However, what the Wayback Machine saves is far too much for a handful of volunteers to sort through in any meaningful fashion. They're busy enough just getting servers up and data onto them. And even then they can't get nearly enough...just a fraction of what PRWeb was cranking out for almost a generation.

As much fun as it is to play in the older archives, someone has to do the work of saving more recent information so that future historians will have more about the times we live in now. So I saved what I could in the time that I had, not knowing it would come to such a sudden end.

I think of those times I spent sleeping in, or watching hockey, or playing some game and I feel sad that I wasn't able to save more. But then this isn't the first source that's reworked their website and dumped their archives. The only way to stay sane in this hobby is to not dwell on what's been lost but focus on the things you can save.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

Building a home library on a budget sometimes requires getting creative with storage. Based on anecdotal evidence IKEA's Billy bookcases seem to be the “industry standard” for amateur automotive historians, but they tend to be a little shallow.

IKEA has another solution for those oversized coffee table books, it's just not in the bookshelf section. Their Kallax cube storage, minus the fabric cubes, have 13" x 13" openings and accomodate all but the very largest of books. I recommend adding rubber furniture feet from the hardware store if you're placing it on a hard surface just in case there are spills or leaks.

Now that the inventory is done, it looks like the current combined total of the Crittenden-Walczak Collection is 1198 books. Partly because of John's interest in NASCAR, and partly because of our midwestern American location, stock car racing is heavily represented.

So far nearly 1200 books takes up three Billy bookcases, one 4x4 Kallax cube shelf, six drawers of file cabinets, and a little extra “shelf space” on top of a file cabinet.

That's less than twenty feet of facing. If you have fewer books or more space, you can checkerboard books with die cast displays in the open squares.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

The last book I picked up this past month is a little bit of humor called “Haynes Explains Americans.” It looks like a miniature Haynes manual that explains American behaviors in automotive terms to folks who don't understand us. And it had me thinking about perspectives this week.

So this collection is based on the very far edge of the Chicago suburbs, and has been accumulated from a wide variety of sources but mostly from this area. It's been put together by a couple of guys who watched a lot of NASCAR, some IndyCar, and a little drag racing.

I have one book in Spanish, one book in Italian, one book in French, one book in German, and one book in three languages. The English language collection includes a few books from the UK and Ireland that somehow made their way here.

As much as I'd like to build the definitive library of the automobile, no matter how many Swedish-designed Kallax shelves I fill, it's always going to be skewed towards what's available in the English language and in the American midwest.

I've also discovered, thanks to Consumer Guide's Car Stuff Podcast (no relation) that Publications International is based in Morton Grove, Illinois. Does that have anything to do with why I have so many of their books in my collection? I was shocked to discover when I was much younger and new to the internet that not everyone could go to a White Castle, they were only in 9 states (13 now). Is seeing “By the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide” on a significant portion of a stack of automobile books another regional thing?

Anyway, there's really nothing I can do to fix the regional bias. It's where I live and where I can afford to shop. I'm not sure I want to, I'm really beginning to enjoy my little corner of the world. When it seems the whole world is going a little crazy this is a safe island of sanity with Portillo's, small town fish fry, and the Woodman's cheese aisle. I just hope that others are doing similar things in places I can't afford to get to and I'll keep doing my thing where I am, and that the Red Wings have a better season this year.

Mile Markers

Notes on the progress in building this collection of automotive history.

Online Collection: a big hole was finally filled in the collection of Federal Register notices, bringing the total of just the notices up above 6,000. The increase in total articles was 0.78%.

Offline Digital Collection: I've been downloading some more documents and book PDFs. I can't share them on CarsAndRacingStuff.com, but Document Pages has had a 36.89% increase.

The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: The book backlog is gone and 1198 books have been inventoried. The biggest increase was in periodicals with 5.31% more in the inventory, and now that's where the backlog exists!

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

This month was down a tick to 4,382 visitors generating 7,501 page views. I'm back to using accurate numbers because I finally found the right page in Google Analytics. I'm not sure what's wrong with the computer's in everyone's Dodge Caravan, but that seems to be my all-time most visited page.

The Top 5 pages for the month of July were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Home Page

On This Day in Automotive History

Subtopic: Ford Model T: Custom 1925 Speedster

Index: Vehicles

My personal page is the 8th most visited on the site. In the overall site cleanup I think I'd better do that one next...

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 870,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 55,800 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.

About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection

The combined personal physical collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,066 different book volumes, 1,715 unqiue periodical issues and over 770 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 259 hours of video.