Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Open Diff – What Are the Best Books for an Automotive Library?

Posted June 19, 2019 9:00 AM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: automotive books Discussion

As you can see from the above photo I just took of the Hemmings Motor News library, form follows function when it comes to our shelves. That’s largely because we’d rather spend our library budget on reference materials in our quest to make Hemmings the most accurate possible source of collector car information.

And yet, keeping up with the world of automotive publishing could be a full-time job. The number of new automotive books released on a monthly basis outpaces the number of hours in a day to read them. Meanwhile, we’re always tracking down out-of-print and hard-to-find books to add to our library.

So today’s Open Diff question is a bit self-serving: What books would you recommend to your fellow old car enthusiasts, Hemmings included?

Textbooks, table books, picture books - we welcome suggestions.

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#1

Re: Open Diff – What Are the Best Books for an Automotive Library?

06/19/2019 10:23 AM

The "old" Chilton™ and MOTOR™ "service manuals" from the 1950's!

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Re: Open Diff – What Are the Best Books for an Automotive Library?

06/19/2019 8:56 PM

I find the car repair video's on YouTube save a great deal of time...a video on your exact car with a mechanic showing how he does the repair with tips, special tools and methodology involved is much more satisfying and complete than trying to find the basic information in a book and then deciphering the jargon and stumbling through the repair...So my suggestion is to add videos of every repair on every car out there with the most excellent mechanics you can find....those together with potential sources for parts listed, and/or part numbers...There are certain things that go wrong in certain cars in certain years that you can only learn about through experience, that knowledge is what you need to do the repair as efficiently as you can, and that is what books lack...

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