1001 Images of Cars [antikvár]

FOREWORD C liché though it may be, how can one avoid stating the obinous: the motor car is both symbol and icon of the twentieth century. Although its origins can, in theory, he traced back over two hundred years to the first steam carriage of Nicolas Cugnot, the 1990s are in fact a far more appropriate time for celebrating the centenary of its invention. The brilliant, somewhat madcap engineers who with their own hands put together thefirst models in improvised workshops could never have imagined that, a century later, tens of millions of automobiles a year would be pouring off production lines in countries all round the world. A few of the most famous marques - Ford, Renault, Fiat and Rover - are still around to bear witness to this amazing chapter in human history. It is not without reason that the twentieth century has been called the age of the motor car. Symbol of freedom before it came to be seen as the new monster roaming the urban jungle, inexhaustible laboratory of technical innovations, object of constant artistic research, though a part of everyone's daily life, the motor car has continued to be a source of dreams. And while one may make fun of the exaggerated affection with which individuals regard their car, one cannot help noticing that people also keep a hallowed place in their hearts for the car they aspire to own one day: the car of their dreams. Maybe you will find such a car in the pages of this book, among superb American monsters of the 1930s, eternally seductive British or Italian sports cars, magnificent models of French or German extraction The motor car has become on the one hand a museum piece, on the other the indispensable tool of modern living, a commonplace object and a rarity. Even 1001 photographs will not suffice to tell the full story of the most prolific (and in many ways the most significant) of modern industries, but we have striven to include all the important models, those which characterized their period, and those which still keep up the old traditions. The automobile has always had to face up to four more or less contradictory imperatives: solidity, beauty, speed and usefulness. These will be the cardinal points of our compass as we take a drive through the century of the motor car.