Packard Motor Car Company by Evan P. Ide (2003)

Back in 1957, when the Packard Motor Company called it quits, an avid Packard collector, Roderick Blood, traded a Packard for a filing cabinet.

It contained original photos belonging to James Ward Packard, photos of the earliest production, of ongoing model introductions, publicity and advertising photos, photos of every aspect of Packard Motor Cars.

These photos eventually wound up at a quirky, but fabulous early car museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. Evan P. Ide, curator of the museum, selected the best and the most important, and he and the museum staff developed some of the best captions you'll find anywhere.

This book, part of the Images of America series from Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, SC, is among the best of this breed... books focused on local history, written by people more or less expert in their field. Luckily for us, Ide is indeed an expert auto historian.

In the book you'll find ranks of the first Packard models arrayed on the factory floor -- a factory that began as an electrical component manufactury before Packard bought a Winton motor carriage in 1899. The new owner soon tired of unreliable engineering and confronted the Winton team, who told him, in so many words, to go home -- go make a better car, if he could.

Well, he could, and Packard quality soon became an American watchword, its unique radiator proclaiming its Packard-ness to all in the know. That's one of the elements in this book that you'll enjoy: tracing the graceful design of the Packard radiator, as much a badge as that of the Rolls-Royce, as it subtly shifts and modernizes over time.

James Ward (you wonder if anyone ever called him "Jimmy") pursued a third hobby -- the first, building cars, the second, building race cars -- hiring top-drawer photographers to capture element after element, model after model, detail after detail, beautiful woman drivers after beautiful woman drivers (in an era when conventional wisdom said that men bought and drove the cars) and their mansions... and we gain.

This is a book that will delight Packard enthusiasts, if they have not already purchased it. It will also delight any historian or enthusiast of early cars, as the factory pictures imply much about early (quality) auto building, whether through the cleanliness of the factory floors or the carefully-structured tooling and jigs that are visible in the pictures. Prototypes, car interiors, draftsmen, chassis, differential-mounted overdrives... they're all here, alongside the ad photos (you won't soon forget the one of all the upper crust quietly conversing in and around their Packards in some shady, park-like setting...)