Horseless Carriage Collection of Automobile History

Collection of printed materials and photographs relating to cars, from their early development in the 1890s through the contemporary trends of the 1960s including pamphlets, magazines, promotional reports, newspaper articles, advertisements, calendars, newsletters, pictorial items and photographs. The turn-of-the-century items are nostalgic reprints; the earliest original item is a 1924 Automobile Trade Journal. Most of the items date from the 1940s and 1950s, and were distributed by car and tire dealerships, auto manufacturers, petroleum and motor oil corporations, automobile clubs, and the specialty publisher Floyd Clymer.

There are newsletters, clippings and notices of activities, mostly from 1938 to 1949, for the Horseless Carriage Club. Some publicity brochures describe particular makes of cars. Most of the material relates to the United States but a small amount is about the British and German automobile industries. Brochures and clippings commemorate special events such as the 1908 New York to Paris race, J. Frank Duryea’s winning of America’s first automobile race in 1895 and its fiftieth anniversary in 1945, and the automobile industry’s celebration of its Golden Jubilee in 1946. Black-and-white photographs are present, 1938 to 1940, of collectors with their antique cars, and there are several original drawings by Alexander G. Telatco. Calendars from 1946 and 1953 have color reprints of early cars in Americana settings by artists such as Norman Rockwell.