Reading Suggestions

Books and reference manuals


The Vagabonds; by Jeff Guinn

The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s Ten-Year Road Trip.

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Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Automobile Patent; by William Greenleaf


In 1895,  attorney George B. Selden, who had never built an automobile, was granted a patent for a “road-carriage”.
The Selden patent covered all gasoline-powered vehicles designed since 1879 and manufactured, sold, or used in the United States.

The Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, granted licenses and collected royalties on cars made by other manufacturers until 1903, when the patent was challenged by Henry Ford.

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American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age; by Pete Davies

On July 7, 1919, a cavalcade of sixty-nine military motor vehicles set off from the White House on an epic journey. Their goal was California, and ahead of them lay 3,250 miles of mud and rock. Sixty-two days later they arrived in San Francisco, having averaged just five miles an hour.

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How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot; by John Muir

Very good repair manual.

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Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?; by Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott, John O’Driscoll

The revolutionary Volkswagen advertising campaign of the 1960s and 70s by US ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) is universally acknowledged to be the greatest and most influential ever created and was acclaimed as “the campaign of the century” in the Millennium editions of Time Magazine and the US ad industry bible Advertising Age.

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Is The Bug Dead? The Great Beetle Ad Campaign

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The Jokeswagen Book; by Charles Preston (Editor), Brad Anderson (Contributor)

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