Doug Nye: 130 glorious years of fun and fast books

Then one day, like flicking a light switch, he got it. My word he’d got it. Within 48 hours or so – as I recall – I found I could decipher those black spidery marks using up the pages between the drawings and photographs. I also found that the different-looking spidery marks adjacent to the drawings and captions actually explained what they showed. It was like a 500-watt light bulb suddenly flashing on above my head. I found that I instinctively read signs and posters and newspaper headlines, one glance and one got the gist. It was a revelation, a liberation and an education all at once. Thereafter I read just anything and everything. Especially anything and everything which interested me. So novels and text books, and histories and geographies, and nutsy-boltsy how-to stuff – it was all eagerly devoured.

I also found I had a pretty retentive memory. In fact, it became good enough to be able to picture whole pages in my mind, and then effectively read from them as I sat in a school exam. Hey – this is good. Is this cheating or are we allowed? It turned out that both bore an element of truth, and so I began to trundle my entirely unplanned way through an enthusiast’s life. And thus far, well over sixty years later, the trundling continues.

OK – so what was the book in this particular cardboard Christmas parcel? I stripped off the tape and pulled the tear-strip and…wow!. It was one of the early copies of the latest Goodwood publication – ‘Twenty Glorious Years’ – celebrating the 20^th anniversary of our Goodwood Revival Meeting. 

Now I can write freely about this publishing event because I – apart from providing some of the photos reproduced within the book – have had absolutely nothing to do with this baby – nothing whatsoever. As the Duke writes in his Foreword “Perhaps it will not come as too much of a surprise… to discover that this book is also a little playful. Rather than a linear history of the 20 events since 1998, it is an evocation of the Revival era; 20 chapters to take us from the Second World War (when the circuit was first laid as an airfield perimeter track) to my grandfather’s first race meeting in 1948, and on to 1966, when increasing speeds forced him to end competition…”

Through 250 pages this compact volume recalls the fashions, faces, events and races of that era – the Revival races themselves sometimes echoing the past “with uncanny likeness”. 

The book is jam-packed with evocative photography – ranging from a stand of Hawker Typhoons here at what was then the wartime RAF Westhampnett fighter base to the wonderful Ray Hanna zooming down the pit straight in his Spitfire at an altitude of a good 14ft 6ins as he reopened the course for our inaugural Revival Meeting in ’98. There are Bristol Blenheim bombers, and Douglas Bader – the fabulous 1948 London Motor Show – a clothing coupon from a 1949 ration book – one of the first drawings of the Dan Dare comic strip – the introduction of the Kenwood electric Chef food mixer- first-class travel on an ocean liner – introduction into service of the De Havilland Comet, “the giant jetliner” – and more, and more… 

Balance all this atmosphere against Revival racing photography over the past twenty meetings – and for the serious students there’s a listing of all the race winners in the appendices – and this is a lovely, handy, dip-into publication to keep and cherish – surely a must for any keen GRRC Member’s bookshelf.

But – above all – where I am concerned the real crowning glory of this new book is simply its front-cover design – at once both under-stated, yet glorious. It is debossed into the dark British Racing Green cloth-bound front cover, which means it is stamped down into the surface via a crisply-cut metal die. And in black and gleaming gold the illustration there depicts the late-period Motor Circuit pits, with the Union flags proudly flying from its flagpoles, and a golden sun’s rays radiating high into the cloud-patched sky.  

For me, a self-raising book collector from childhood – as described – this is a truly delightful throwback in book design not strictly to the Goodwood Motor Circuit era itself, but even earlier. I have always adored this kind of debossed device adorning a book cover. Designer of ‘Twenty Glorious Years’ is Nick Elsden, who explains “The cover is relatively simple. The illustration was created and then split into two. One part for the black (pit lane) the other for the foil (sunrise). The pit lane was simply printed in black ink and the gold is a foil emboss. Although this seemed quite straightforward, getting to this point was quite a task. As well as refining the illustration to make sure it retained enough detail and making it simple enough to print, we also had to produce many tests on all sorts of stock to see what worked best. We tried textured cloth as well as plain and textured paper. In the end DR (the Duke of Richmond) made the final selection which was the one with a textured green paper. This was then all mounted onto card and bound together with the text pages. Oh and the gilded page edges” – which are also simply gorgeous – “…is a foil the same as the sunrise.” See? Simple isn’t it. But as I say I love embossed and debossed book covers of this kind.

One of the earliest of all English-language motor racing books – if not the earliest – is ‘Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing’ by Charles Jarrott. He was one of this country’s earliest pioneer racing drivers – and his unselfconsciously conceited – typically Edwardian toff – prose is mirrored by a debossed cover in which he – and a diminutive riding mechanic – are manfully wrestling one of his great Panhard chain-drives around a tyre-tearing bend at high speed. Jarrott’s breezy text covers various motoring indiscretions, quite apart from his city-to-city racing exploits “on the Continent”. One gets the hang of Jarrott prose when he describes the bench of magistrates before which he was summoned for driving a motor car at a speed greater than 12 miles per hour. “The chairman was an elderly, austere and acetic-looking parson, with whom time had not dealt gently…A red-faced, fiery-looking farmer, who seemed as if he had just ridden to copurt at much personal inconvenience to himself…while the third was a weakly-looking, effeminate young man, evidently only recently having returned from college. And wearing that vacant stare which nature kindly bestows upon those she has little endowed with brains…”. You get the picture? Due respect signally lacking…

Another collector’s piece from my shelves with a nicely debossed – although in this case merely lettered – front cover is Pierre Souvestre’s seminal French work ‘Histoire de l’Automobile’, published by Dunot et Pinat of Paris in 1907. This is a very serious and detailed treatise on the early development of such pioneers as Walter Hancock’s steam carriages of the early 19^th Century, Nicolas Jules-Raffard’s electric tramway of the early 1880s, up to Emile Levassor’s first great Panhards – and beyond. On page 571 I remember getting a kick out of the headline there – ‘La France gagne Paris-Vienne – Edge emporte La Coupe Gordon Bennett en Angleterre’ – ‘France wins Paris-Vienna – Edge wins the Gordon Bennett Cup for England’. Hurrah! Selwyn Francis Edge (1868-1940) was an Australian-born entrepreneur and sportsman who made his name in Great Britain and beyond as a pioneer racing cyclist before turning to motor-cycles and cars as a natural progression. When he drove his Napier car to victory in the 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup he was scoring the first British victory in what passed then for top-line International motor racing. As I write pioneer racing driver S.F. Edge lies buried in Tilford churchyard, here on the Surrey-Hampshire border, barely 2½-miles away as the crow flies.

Another nicely debossed classic is the two-volume ‘The World on Wheels’ compiled by pioneering motor trade and industry entrepreneur Henry Osbaldeston Duncan. Like his friend Edge he became a racing cyclist of world renown and is credited with having introduced the chain-driven bicycle to the French – replacing the centre-drive 'penny farthings' of course. 

Duncan developed firm associations with the De Dion Bouton Company, and he published ‘The World on Wheels’ in 1926 from Paris. He was such a true motoring pioneer he had actually participated in the 1896 London to Brighton Emancipation Run, staged to demonstrate that the motor car was a practical means of transport. He was also described to me decades ago by one real veteran as “a complete rogue, amongst a bevy of motor trade rogues” – but his books are wonderful products of their period.

Of simply debossed cover design – but I just love the title – is ‘Wall Smacker’ from American-Italian racing driver Peter de Paolo published in 1935. He had begun his racing career as riding mechanic in such races as the Indy ‘500’ to his uncle, the great Ralph de Palma. Here’s a little de Paoloese: “As soon as we finished, we drove to our garage…and locked the doors. Uncle stretch out on a bench and almost immediately fell asleep. I was planning to do the same when I heard a knock on the rear window…someone called “Raff, Hey, Raff!”. It was the leader of the Italian delegation. Fearing that they might wake uncle I quietly opened the window just a bit. The Italian said “De Palma! Where is he? I want to speak to Raff!”.

“Shh!” I put my finger to my lips as a signal for silence “He’s asleep!” I whispered.

“We want to see Raff!” he sang out again in an excited manner and exclaimed “He no win-a da race. He break-a my heart!” 

And more of the same… folksy, historically immensely untrustworthy, but always fun.

In 1939 Captain George Eyston published ‘Fastest on Earth’, another nice book with a debossed cover design – and this time a proper history of the World Land Speed Record which the Captain – a hugely popular and honoured member of the British motor sporting community – traced up to his own successful 1938-39 car Thunderbolt and his great contemporary rival John Cobb’s fabulous Railton Special. While the Railton survives as jewel in the automotive crown of the Birmingham Science Museum, ‘Thunderbolt’ was burned out in catastrophic warehouse store fire in Rongotai, New Zealand, while on a display tour there. But the Captain’s books live on…

The later 1930s were not perhaps a great good-fun era of motor racing at its pinnacle level as the ‘Silver Arrow’ German teams of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union swept all before them in the name of Hitler’s Third Reich. One veteran suggested to me years ago that their Grand Prix racing programme should have been sponsored by the German tourist board, under the slogan “Visit Us… Before We Visit You”.  

The most charismatic hero of that German juggernaut’s advance was undoubtedly DKW racing motor-cyclist turned Auto Union racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer. He was young, good-looking, fun-loving, a great athlete and a richly-talented racing driver. He had transferred from motorcycles to cars with virtually zero experience of racing on fours wheels, and so had no pre-loaded antipathy towards the AU’s rear-engined, swing-axled terminal oversteer. His innate sense of balance enabled him to drive those cars closer to their limits than anyone else – until he ran out of luck attacking class Land Speed Records at Darmstadt on January 28^th, 1938 – so we are just approaching that unhappy date’s 80^th anniversary. He lost control of his car near maximum speed and crashed fatally into a bridge abutment. He left a widow – German aviatrix Ellie Beinhorn-Rosemeyer and a baby son, and later that year a biography was German-published, entitled ‘Mein Mann, der Rennfahrer’. With twisted Nazi logic it was all printed in small type in the florid Gothic German script so beloved of Hitler and his cohorts, which renders it virtually unreadable. An English translation was published but pulped the instant War broke out soon after its delivery to the UK – to my knowledge only one or two copies actually survive.

But in context here the front cover of the German edition has a lovely little rendition of the open-cockpit Auto Union AVUS streamliner debossed into its cloth binding.

But nearly all of these precursors of the new ‘Twenty Glorious Years’ Goodwood Revival book pale into insignificance beside the wonderfully over-the-top debossing of the front cover of the 1887-88 ‘Boy’s Own Annual’ contemporary with Karl Benz first causing all the automotive trouble we have mostly enjoyed for 130 years…

The past twenty Revival Meetings have provided us all with a proper sense of proportion – and this week – from here in amongst the jam-packed motoring bookshelves – may I wish that all our members and readers had a very Happy Christmas, and an enjoyable, fulfilling, and safe, New Year.