What’s the first serious car book you bought? Still have?

I have a Muir book for the Datsun's.  The cool thing about his books are those drawings - you can get lost looking into the detail.  
 

Still have it. 

How to make your car handle for me as well, although I remember him going on at length about how narrow tires worked just as well as wide ones, which reminds me  a bit of the rear-engine evangelists. "What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" 

Fred Puhn worked at the same company as me, decades ago. I never met him (huge company) but did call him to discuss his book :)

Cousin_Eddie (Forum Supporter) said:

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by John Muir. The early one, spiral bound, first edition. Way back in the 80s. 

Me too ,

also How to Hot Rod your VW engine , HP books

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

How to make your car handle for me as well, although I remember him going on at length about how narrow tires worked just as well as wide ones, which reminds me  a bit of the rear-engine evangelists. "What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" 

That reminds me of another foundational text in my education as a car guy. Not a book, but rather a collection of forum posts/emails combined into a text file by the author, Scott Griffith, aka "skod". If you were into Fox bodies in the early to mid 90s, skod was THE expert on making them turn, brake, and survive on a road course. He had a 1986 Mustang GT that he ran in northern California.

Anyhow, I was on a listserv back in probably 1996 or so that he was a member of, and he sent me a copy of the file. It was called "Building the Perfect Pony". I read it over and over, dissected every bit of it. One of his contentions was that tire width wasn't nearly as important as proper setup. I was getting into autocross then, so I went out with my 89 LX on 225s and promptly and repeatedly got my ass handed to me by guys on much wider rubber. Took me a few years to finally get that through my head. 

Datsun310Guy said:

Ordering a book in grade school to have it delivered a month later doesn't count - 

What's the first real car book you bought? (Below - car buddy suggested it)

Still have it? (Yes, close to 40 years now)  

Plans with all your books? (I'm sure my kids will drop them off Goodwill or fill a recycling bin)

I loved that Z car comparison picture - thought it was cool.  

 

When I was learning to read my dad had that, and Race Car Fabrication and Preparation out all the time. I've read them cover to cover, and in I think third grade did a book report on how to make your car handle.  Hard to believe I wasn't more popular.  
 

Probably mentioned already and while maybe not the first definitely the best, The Unfair Advantage.  I learned things from that book that I still think about.  Like the fact that a well worn engine with a fresh valve job will often outperform a completely rebuilt engine by a good margin provided that the rings still seal.  Like the fact that the much ballyhooed 917/30 Can Am car succeeded despite Porsche's engineers instead of because of them - Penske had to show them how to set it up.  They were so unbelievably arrogant that it would have never worked the way they insisted upon.  At least according to Donohue.  Now that I've dealt with BMW motorcycles for the past 15 years I can appreciate where he was coming from.  I'd recommend that book to anyone.

Then there's 'Best Damn Garage in Town' by Henry "Smoky" Yunick.  A very hard to find book now likely due to the fact that it's an extremely long, rambling, quasi-unreadable tome filled with racism and misogyny.  However, there are flashes of brilliance in it and I still recommend it if you can find it.  He mentions things like the fact that a Hudson Hornet was the most overbuilt car made.  "Where it needed a rivet, it had three",...and many other Smokyisms.  

This is probably the first serious car book I bought:

...because it led me to building this:

Woody (Forum Supportum) said:

The SECOND (semi) serious car book that I ever bought was a spiral bound copy of John Muir's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Step by Step Guide for the Complete Idiot, which remains one of the greatest books written about anything ever. It should be a Must Read for everyone, even if they don't care about Volkswagens. 
 

I had the spiral wound but don't any longer. I have a hard copy and a digital though.

Life changer.

In reply to preach (dudeist priest) :

The most important part of John Muir's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is that it teaches you about mechanical harmony, and mechanical empathy. 

I know that I had John Muir's VW book early on. My dad's '71 Beetle was passed down to my brother and I when I first started driving and the book was essential.

That book was lost in my many moves and transitions in the 1980s.

Looking at my bookshelf, I still have The Great Cars by Ralph Stein - purchased about the same time late 1970s

I have the non-spiral version of John Muir’s air-cooled VW book, but my Rabbit book is spiral-bound. 

Pretty sure my grandparents got this one for me, and I devoured it inside-out a million times: The Complete Book of Collectible Cars by Richard M. Langworth, Graham Robson and Consumer Reports. 

Look at those Cobra prices!

Not necessarily serious but it was "the unfair advantage" by Mark Donohue.     And way...... back in the day, I studied Road Atlanta in every available detail before turning a semi serious lap there. They sold a VHS on the driving line that was probably the most helpful thing at that time.    

Depends on if you consider some of the old magazine annuals a book, if so then a Car Craft annual from around 1984 that I think was a compilation of tech articles.  Reading that book cover to cover a few times got me through a rather miserable week of my life when I was 14.  I think I still have it in my attic. 

First actual book was probably a Chilton manual for the Dart/Demon.  I am pretty sure I still have it. I've kept every Chilton/Haynes manual I've ever bought, even for a few cars I didn't own but was asked to work on. 

DrMikeCSI said:

I have the older version of "How To Make Your Car Handle" that has Peter Gregg's Brumos Porsche on the cover. It looks like a lot of us have very similar libraries. 

Same.  Was my bible in my formative autocross "race engineer" years.  Still use it today.

In reply to Andy Hollis :

And the full library...

Milliken's Race Car Vehicle Dynamics.  826 pages of complete nerd-dom.

I have a strong math background and bought this book while a few of my synapses still comprehended the calculus.  I got it just before taking a 5 day train trip and I read it cover to cover.  I couldn't put it down.  Being able to put pictures and math behind the physics that vaguely already made sense to me was fascinating.

Like, I knew the basics about camber angles, roll centers, and CG, but to see it all written down and explained was a brain orgasm.

Still have it.

In reply to SPG123 :

Thanks for the reminder I need to find a copy of this book. 

I can't find the exact one but it was one of these casting number books. I did have this one too, but it wasn't the first one I bought.

I had all of them and could rhyme off small block Chev casting numbers in my sleep. I was interested in low production, early smog cylinder heads, but totally obsessed with rare/oddball cast iron 2bbl intake manifolds and used to rummage through country yards looking for treasures. With the advent of the internet, and my interests moving almost exclusively to sport compacts, I sold them all on ebay

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Milliken is excellent but I admit what I've read of it I have to read a couple of times. Note I don't have the book so it's all excerpts that I've read.

I have all of the Smith books; they work well for me.

David Vizard's How to Build Horsepower. Eventually got to meet him at PRI.

We can argue about Chilton's being "serious", but I bought a multi-make Chilton's 1954-1963 Auto Repair Manual to cover my '63 Belair high school car, and it is still in the bookcase.  The Valiant section covers my '64 V200 with better photos than some in the factory service manual.  Slant-six Valiants didn't change much between '63 and '64.

It looks just like this, but mine's greasier: 

Other than various Haynes/Chilton's/Motor's service manuals, the first one I ever bought was How To Build Max Performance Pontiac V8's by Jim Hand. 



This was tough to get at the time; I ordered this one through a GF that worked at Borders in the early 2000's when I was piecing together parts to build a Pontiac V8 for my Trans Am. At the time, the info in the book was fantastic, albeit a bit old school, but we're also talking about an engine platform that was out of production over 20 years at the point of publication.

Somewhere along the line, the publisher decided to replace the book with one with the same title written by another Pontiac expert named Rocky Rotella. I haven't read this one yet, but I do remember Rocky being a member of some Pontiac forums I was on and being extremely knowledgeable. I think this one includes more of the aftermarket parts that have been produced in the past 20 years, whereas the Jim Hand book really focuses on stock components and how to select the best stock parts.