Barely a week goes by without a book thumping on to the desks in C&SC towers purporting to be the definitive list of the best 100/500/1000 classics/supercars/beautiful cars/whatever.
I don’t have anything against that, but just as when C&SC picks a group of cars (except when we use a poll of experts or readers, of course), unless it goes into encyclopaedic depth, it is by definition going to be rather subjective. The exception possibly being the Cars of the Century project some years back.
In their more candid moments, many of the authors will confess that their choices are influenced by all manner of trivial things (quite apart from their personal preferences car-wise) such as what they have written about recently, what they know they can do off the top of their heads, or tweak from previous efforts, or even what photos they already have to hand.
To be honest, knowing what they get paid for a book and the effort that it takes to complete one, I can understand why some of the writers don’t sweat too much over every tome they churn out.
I should also stress that I am definitely not implying that any of the books in the main picture are representative of any of what I am saying, they were just a few random ones I grabbed for a quick photo.
So, don’t get me wrong, there are millions of emphatically impressive labour-of-love books out there, but with this particular genre, it always strikes me that readers are being slightly misled by the presentation of these lists as comprehensive when they are usually anything but.
What to do about it, then?
