Automobile Year Books of Models (1982-84)

[Matt Bacon]

It seems there are not many people other than me interested in these -- just picked them up for pocket change. Automobile Year was a high end yearbook of motor cars and motor sport which ran for several decades, initially in French and English and then just in French. These (in English) have the same sort of format. In depth articles on auto  model related subjects (A Tour of Tamiya, Large scale metal models focusing on Revival, SE Finecast and others, a build of a big Pocher kit); a month by month review of the years releases in plastic kits and diecasts, with lots of colour photographs, and a bound in listing of all the years' releases by manufacturer on cheaper paper. They run 150-200 pages in all. It looks like only three years were ever published,and here they are... Worth a look if you're a car-modelling plastic kit or diecast historian, like me. In my case these cover the years where I first err.... discovered... girls so I wasn't paying attention to models and kits, and they fill in the blank in my memory nicely.

best,

M.

[hustinettenbaer]

I like this kind of stuff!

There was something similar from Germany:  The Danhausen World Modelcar Book!

Released from the Brothers Lang and theyr famous Modelcar Shop Danhausen in Aachen, they released this from the 70ies up to 1993. The last catalouge from 93 had aprox. 15.000 modelcars on 350 pages in it, they said these where all the modelcars availlable worldwide. Because they had a shop, you could order all those cars in the book, but I know most of the stuff wasn´t availlable, even with some years waiting time. They had every obscure Modelcarmanufacturer in it, so chances to order something never ever availlable where big...

Those where divided in the nicely paper part with all the normal stuff (large series manufacturer and lots of colour pictures) and the plain cheap paper part with only black/white pics and mostly text, there was all the info about smallseries manufacturer (white metal & resine, like Provence Moulage, Western Models, Alezan, BBR, Ugo Fadini,...). They also made theyr own Danhausen Modelcars (produced by Western Models and AMR) under the Minichamps label, which later was made by one of the brothers into one of the bigger manufacturers for 1/43 and 1/18 cars.

I was aprox. 13/14 years old, when I found this book for the first time in the 80ies. It was like a bible to me... ?

Greetings

Markus