This may be the most heavily researched of the Standard Catalog of American Car series. That’s by necessity — the 1,612-page catalog covers almost 140 years and a huge number of minor makes.
Editors Beverly Rae Kimes and Henry Austin Clark Jr. emphasize breadth rather than depth in the information. For example, unlike the other two books in this series (1946-1976 and 1976-1999), this catalog does not include dimensions, options and engine information for minor makes.
Instead, this catalog offers original factory prices as well as estimated collector’s market prices for five condition levels. Of course, those prices were current as of 1996. Given the perishability of this information, one wonders why they made such a large investment of page space.
As with most other Standard catalogs, this is an unpretentious source of information, replete with non-glossy paper and small black-and-white photographs. Those with eyesight problems may need a magnifying glass to read text blocks, which suffer from small san-serif type lacking in paragraph breaks.
Standard Catalog of American cars 1805-1942
- Beverly Rae Kimes and Henry Austin Clark, Jr.; 1996; Third Ed.
- Krause Publications, Iola, WA
“A factor inherent in any list, of course, is that it is quantitative, and by its nature does not for the most part judge qualitatively. Compounding of error is thus inevitable. A car incorrectly indicated to have been built on a 1908 car roster, for example, may be perpetuated as a bona-fide entry for decades thereafter. A typo appearing in a list from the 1950s might continue to be entered as a legitimate car on lists in the 1980s. And to further muddy things, some historians (myself and Ralph Dunwoodie among them) are convinced that a few list compilers inserted bogus cars in their own efforts just to determine if other list compilers were indulging in plagiarism. There is something perversely delightful about that, but it does nonetheless present a dilemma.” (p. 5)
“By 1925 the Essex coach was priced five dollars less than the touring model. This was unheard of in the industry. A ‘packing crate’ the competition might deride, but the car sold like hotcakes…. In 1929 Essex sales contributed handsomely to the over 300,000 Hudson total, and the company was third in the industry.” (p. 541)
“MERCILESS — Huntington, New York — (1906-1907) — As strange as it might seem, the name was purposely chosen. It was, its makers believed, as close an approximation to Mercedes as might be conjured without fear of a lawsuit. Likewise, the Merciless itself was as near a copy of the German car as legally comfortable without license.” (p. 961)
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RE:SOURCES
- Flammang, James M. and Ron Kowalke; 1999. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999.Third Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised Fourth Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
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