History borrowed some little pages circa 1960

friend of mine that manages a highline collision shop loaned me a small collection of little pages books.... they're all from around 1959-60 and are a good glimpse into what was the "scene" at that time... oddly, very few of what WE consider "traditional RODS" in them.... lots of postwar cars with varying degrees of mods and some wild customs... a lot of tech tips and ideas; too many snaps of cars without telling where and who....

the actual LABOR that went into doing serious mods on cars in those days is ASTOUNDING compared to what we can accomplish at home now...

i'd scan and post pics but these are A. not MY books and B. i'm NOT sure that's actually legal.....

i'm having fun AND learning something... like Fat Albert warned me!

 

really, I have a large collection and what I see are lots of traditional hotrods? What is your warped definition of traditional? There was a fair amount of odd stuff, especially at teh drags since folks were still experimenting. But, I see tons of neat early Fords and even Chevys along with some pretty cool full bodied mild customs.

 

well; a lot of the customs (these are Rod and Custom, Rodding and Restyling, etc) are trending toward the overdone end of the scale (part of that era most likely) while the simple A-V8 or Deuce highboy is almost considered "quaint" when they are featured!

i'm not hacking on any of it, BTW; it was all essential to the constant change in tastes and while some concepts are shall we say "less tasteful" in hindsight, they showed imagination and a willingness to chop up iconic stuff like '40 Fords and '32 3-windows....

those eternally damned Appleton dummy spotlights sold like hotcakes apparently..... not MANY cars featured DIDN'T have them.
(just kidding about the eternal damnation there. i like them myself...)

i have seen a BUNCH of cars we've drooled over and used as examples of how to do it right, too.

the double page spread ads for Almquist and JC Whitney are a walk down memory lane... kitsch at it's best! a "mini-supercharger" to fit under your carb.... LOL!

 

Perception is everything. I tend to pass over the uglies, which there were quite a few. To me the 58-62 era has some of the coolest hotrods and customs. When the showcars started getting changed for the sake of change I think is when it went downhill into the Musclecar era.

 

A different world back then. I was there. For the regular guy in Smalltown, USA the little books were dream books. Most had neither the money or talent to build what we saw in them. What they did was give us ideas and motivation. It was an age of experiments. We'd read it and then go out and try it. Runs to the local junkyard were frequent trying to find that piece we saw in the little books.

What a great time to grow up.

 

Does anyone know why they were so little?

 

So you could hide them in your English book.
Larry T

 

people had better eyesight 50 years ago

 

Yes sir they were targeting the youth...that is why there is a lot of Go-Cart ads.

 

And shorter arms

 

Ha ha ah ha ha ha!!!!!!!

 

I was told years ago it was to emulate Readers Digest, which was the most popular magazine in the world at one time. Not sure if that is true, but that's what I was told.

 

i've heard it was so they'd fit in the pocket of your jeans.. of course, jeans were cut real loose in them days!

i agree, the period when cars started getting redone every year to meet the new show season was rough on good taste sometimes..... i think the '49-'51 Mercs, '55-'60 Chevies, and Squarebirds were the hardest hit by repeatedly being "updated" by trophy hunters. i love simplicity and cleanliness of line; some of the gook wagons were literally buried under excess trim and extended fenders, bumpers, etc....

i do not envy the guys doing body work with the tools of that time! just getting a headlight frenched was a study in hard labor....

 

Rodding and restyling was aimed at the custom crowd mainly.

 

News stand exposure. The news dealer could...and did...stand them in front of the larger magazines. While the large magazines were overlapped, with covers only partly exposed, the little magazine covers were almost always completely exposed. Basic marketing.

And, of course, smaller mags used smaller amounts of paper and ink, and I'd suspect they were less expensive to market through distributors due to lower shipping-weight-per-unit.

Also, while photo quality was not an issue in the west coast****les, the east coast mags ran notoriously bad photos. Bad photos don't look so bad when they're little as when they're big.