Roadwork: A Problem Shared

Editors Note – This is another great read from Friend of Hooniverse Chris Haining, who goes by the screen name of Rust-MyEnemy. Go over to his blog to get to know Chris more.

Well, with you guys enjoying Labour (sic) Day, I thought I’d step into the breach. And I thought I’d abuse this privilage by opening my heart and sharing one of my problems.

Last week I spent £9 on eBay. This investment saw two envelopes land in my in-tray, one of them containing a 1992 Jaguar range catalogue, the other housing a brochure for the 1987 Leyland DAF Roadrunner truck range.

Thing is, I’m 30 years old, my CD collection features The Orb, Boards Of Canada and eclectic current acts like Wild Beasts and Little Dragon. I have a beautiful Girlfriend and a reasonable circle of friends who don’t groan whenever I approach them. I fly stunt-kites and am a Glastonbury music festival regular. I have a couple of tattoos. These are all reasonably cool hallmarks to have, but all of this can only go so far to balance my disturbing fetish for collecting brochures.

I’ve probably got in the region of a thousand car brochures at home, spread throughout two IKEA bookshelves that conspire to bow my bedroom floor. My oldest, for a Ford Zephyr, dates from the late ‘sixties, but the last four decades are well represented. They come from far and wide, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, The US, and I have a particular penchant for Japanese brochures that I can’t actually read but enjoy looking at the pictures.

I would have more, but in the early ‘nineties I went on a short holiday with my best mate, visiting his Nanna in Gloucester. While I was away, My Mum had a “Tidy up.” She went systematically through my room, binning clutter. When I returned to a frighteningly organised room, my brochures were the first thing I checked, and I was dismayed to find the collection completely decimated.

It was a dark period in my life. The deep plastic crate they were kept in was now only about a third full. My Peugeot brochures, from a dealership which had long closed and been demolished, were gone. No longer could I read about 309s or 505s. The Honda brochures that my Father had collected and given me when he visited me in hospital, were no more, and I can still see them in my head even now; Shuttle, Prelude and Legend. My priceless Porsche 959 one, today probably worth more than both my real cars put together, had vanished.

“I only threw away the old ones…”

Old? OLD? You mean significant! That’s what I would have screamed had I been sufficiently eloquent at age twelve, and will scream should the same thing ever happen in the future. I mean, during the post-war redevelopment of so many British cities, in the name of progress they only demolished the old buildings, and that led to such all-time greats as The Elephant & Castle, Birmingham Bullring and Northampton Bus Station, for heavens sake.

Immediately I began labouring to rebuild my collection, but, for a good few years I found things incredibly frustrating. Like the top twenty hit singles of today, in the early nineties I found the cars of the time anodyne and unsatisfying. I yearned for brochures for the cars of a few years past, so much so that I wrote to Ford in the hope that they kept back issues. They didn’t. Nevertheless I continued to collect when I could, but it was a sporadic operation that pulsed whenever I happened to visit another country, or walk past some exotic car dealership. Like Nissan.

By the time I reached university I had once again amassed a not inconsiderable collection, although it was still horribly inconsistent. Then, and I remember it exactly, an event happened that would ruin my life and turn me into the monster I have become.

It was at the 2002 Birmingham Motorshow. I had circulated through the stands full of over-polished automobiles and over-made-up “brand representatives”, and had worked my way to the small, low-budget stalls where traders and chancers displayed their wares. I always liked this part of the show, I had been known to buy a 1:18^th scale car or five from these stalls in the past. This year, though, I first noticed a stand selling, of all things, old car brochures.

Shit.

From that point, I was screwed. There before me was laid out a veritable feast for my disturbed, obsessive eyes. Carefully dust-sleeved documents hung displayed from the roof, time-faded mementos of the past by Wolesley, Singer, Invicta, often with eye-watering price-tags. But none of this blue-chip classic stuff really interested me. I headed straight for the Ford section.

At that point I was a stinking free-loading student and therefore keen not to eat too heavily into my cider and fish-fingers budget. Pleasingly, what I was after seemed, to me, reasonably priced. A 1982 Ford range catalogue, the first to present the new and exciting Sierra, another from Ford but a ’75 one with the Mk III Cortina and Mk I Granada, and two Austin-Rover catalogues from 1984 and 1986, the former featuring the MG Maestro with digital dashboard and voice synthesizer.

I spent £14 in all on these four items, and many would say that that was an obscene sum to spend on things that usually get thrown away. But now they were mine and I would have them forever. I read them several hundred times over in the coming months, longingly gazing at images of cars that had probably been scrapped a decade ago.

This is what I put my fascination down to. In my current, nicely swollen collection I have documentation for many of the cars that time forgot; those which will never be remembered with any great fondness except for the very novelty that they existed in the first place. The Honda Quintet, the Talbot Tagora, the Renault 9 and amazing Vauxhall Midi Albany; in many cases, the brochure has well outlived most of the actual cars it was written to promote.

I some cases I see owning the brochure as the next best thing to owning the car. I have a DeLorean DMC-12 brochure, and so I feel somehow connected, involved with the history of the car. I will never own one, probably never even drive one. But I can read the brochure in the same way that prospective purchasers did back in ’81.

On the whole, though, exotica doesn’t really interest me. I don’t have a single proper Ferrari brochure, mainly because supercar brochures tend to be really boring. They’re all poetry and soft-focus images, luxuriously produced but light on information. This is because a brochure for a Ferrari and one for a Hyundai are intended to serve very different purposes.

If a chap is in the market for a Hyundai, the chances are he’s not heading for an emotion-led purchase. He will want to pore over the specifications, comparing it to all its competitors in an array of different areas; tedious to most, fascinating to me. If the same chap is heading for a Ferrari dealership, odds on he wants a Ferrari. All the brochure needs to do is further his lust, and this can be done with artfully lit photography and imaginative prose.

Personally, I enjoy a brochure with a matrix-chart highlighting the differences between Merit, L and CD. “…Hmm, with the GLS I get sports seats, but forgo the centre armrest in the rear. And would I rather have Cobra Red or brightwork bumper inserts?” I spent ages deciding, in my capacity as an imaginary purchaser of 1980’s Fords, whether my two litre fuel-injected hatchback should wear GLSi or 2.0iS badges. The differences were incredibly slight but, my god, being a car buyer back then must have been exciting.

eBay has played no part whatsoever in keeping me on the straight and narrow. Somebody, somewhere out there in the world is probably trying to sell exactly what I’m after at a given time and, one by one, the gaps in my collection are healing up. My colleagues have grown used to stuff turning up at work, and humour me when I show my purchases off with the enthusiasm of a puppy in an offal restaurant. Even when I overstep the mark and single myself out for abuse by saying things like “I’m actually a bit disappointed by the Roadrunner brochure, it’s nowhere near as in-depth as my one for the Ford Cargo or Transcontinental…”

This gives the game away, really. I have brochures for commercial vehicles too; from Peterbilt to Mack, Euclid to Neoplan. Motorhomes and Caravans, as well. My motorboat collection is coming along nicely (oh, my kingdom for an 1980 Glastron Carlson brochure, if anybody has one spare…) and I even have a few TBM aircraft leaflets.

If you head to the other end of my bedroom though, you’ll find my most unsettling hoard. In the bottom desk draw lies my cache of domestic electronic brochures. I don’t have that many, but among them there’s no way I’d want to part with a 1991 Panasonic Technics catalogue, nor a leaflet for the Akura branded tat they sold through the Co-Op fifteen years ago. Or, most prized of all, my 1978 Hitachi Hi-Fi portfolio, romanticising the virtues of the Dynaharmony amplification system, and of full-logic controls. 1978, man! The future was already with us, three years before I was born!

I like to think that I have a valuable resource at my disposal, but it’s hard to convince others that any of my couple of hundred kilos of glossy paper are anything but landfill waiting to happen. Genuinely, though, I think they’re significant and worth retaining.

A nineties Phillips electronics brochure I possess goes into some depth discussing its new DCC, Digital Compact Cassette system. This was the cutting-edge technology of the day, and here it’s presented exactly how the manufacturer intended. There are many books charting the history of consumer electronics, but they’re all retrospective. They all chart the eventual success or failure of the product, whereas only the original brochure can present it as it was when it represented the great white hope of the company. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Brochures help to provide an excellent record of the fashions of the day. Remember when black rubber bootlid spoilers were de rigeur? Remember the industry’s fascination with valves, and when low-profile tyres were still something to shout about? All this and more is documented in my collection. And this is where my Japanese brochures excel, they chart technologies that never even made it to the UK.

You could have, in your 1990 Nissan Skyline (not the fancy-pants GT-R, we’re talking the bread and butter saloon model here), a six cassette changer. Cassette! A Toyota Chaser could be equipped with wipers on the front doors! Twin-turbocharging was rife, as was selectable four wheel drive. The Japanese domestic car market in the late eighties and early nineties was a far more interesting scene than we had here in England.

Today I’m trying to kick the habit, or at least bring it under control. A new, stricter internet filter at work prevents me placing eBay bids during workday lulls. I deliberately give myself less internet time in the evenings lest I should wander onto the ‘bay and enter “Subaru SVX brochure” into the search box, and being as my Girlfriend and I are saving for a house, every brochure I don’t buy brings us a step closer to a mortgage.

But, between you and I, I’ll still leap at the chance of anything turning up for free. Storage space is a concern, but one I’ll address when I have to, not before. If you excellent chaps from outside England see that I could benefit from a bit more automotive cultural education, and you just happen to have a brochure for a Buick Reatta or an Otosan Taunus that you can’t be bothered trying to sell on eBay, I’d be glad to give you my postal address…

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1. Roadwork: Which Monza is Right for Me?
2. Roadwork: The Lancia Gamma
3. Roadwork: Note From An Insider
4. Roadwork: The £Grand Tour, Part One
5. Last Call – Well, There’s Your Problem.