Get a Horse

Last week the second printing of an unusual U.S. art book was all but exhausted and the third printing was on the presses. The book is Floyd Clymer's Historical

Motor Scrapbook (Clymer Motors, $1.50). To Americans for whom an automobile is a 20th Century work of art and its evolution a nostalgic memory, Floyd Clymer's modest scrapbook is a must.

Tall, mild, bespectacled Floyd Clymer operates Clymer Motors, a Los Angeles wholesale and mail-order automobile-and motorcycle-equipment firm. When Floyd was seven, his doctor-father first let him drive his new 1902, curved-dash Oldsmobile. By the time he was eleven, Floyd was an agent (in Berthoud, Colo.) for Reo, Maxwell, Cadillac. In Floyd's motorcycling prime he broke a world's record for the 100-mile (71 min. 1916), a Pike's Peak record (26 min. 13 sec.; 1926), and his coccyx.

Because he has always intensely loved them, Floyd Clymer knows primitive automobiles, motorcycles and their labyrinthine lore as a classical scholar knows the conflicting texts of Manilius. Clymer has always salted down automotive data and keepsakes. In his office files are scores of automobile articles, thousands of automobile advertisements, which he saved from old magazines like Horseless Age and Ainslee's Advertiser.

U.S. Ecstasies. Fussing around affectionately among these memories, it one day occurred to Floyd Clymer that other people might enjoy them too. So he began to paste them together to make his book. In it the automobile evolution is traceable in illustrations of 250 cars and motorcycles, mostly dating from 1902 to the early '20s. Many of the illustrations are photographs, made by cameras whose eyes had not lost their innocence. Many others are drawings, some as stripped and lucid as blueprints. Others blend the clean precisions of semimechanical drawing with proud, naive little achievements that catch the shine of leather and paint, the glamor of glass, the tilt of a driver's sporting face.

As the auto solidifies in prestige, pomp and circumstance seep into the drawings (not to mention the ad copy). But there is an image of 1912 evening pleasure, with its silky escort, its four moth-white, moth-soft ladies enwombed in the felicities of a cross-sectioned Waverly Electric, in a rain-dim street, which catches a sort of elegant U.S. ecstasy that few conscious artists have caught.

Editor Clymer has scarcely begun to revive memories of the 2,200 makes of car (including So steamers) which once competed for space in U.S. garages. But a second "interesting . . . educational . . . surprising . . . comical" book is due next August, a third, devoted entirely to steamers, in October.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.