"The Legendary Model T Ford" by Tom Collins

"Ford Model T - the car that put the world on wheels" by Lindsay Brooke

Thanks.

Hi Constantine,

Okay, here's a comparison of the two books, "The Legendary Model T Ford--The Ultimate History of America's First Great Automobile," by Tom Collins and "Ford Model T--The car That Put the World on Wheels," by Lindsay Brooke.

Collins' book is a big, heavy, hard-cover "coffee-table book," with a cover that looks nice without a dust jacket. It's chock full of photos, most of them in full color. Some of the photos are quite good, others are a bit softly focused. Art direction is excellent and the typeface is large and easily legible. It's published by Krause Publications, a name I've heard associated with the Model T in more than one place.

Collins' book is a 300+ page overview for a beginner with little or no knowledge on the subject. Collins hits the high points of the Model T story, with a good deal of information on Henry Ford and lots of pages are devoted to individual model years and their differences, but this technical information isn't comprehensive enough to be really useful to someone in the hobby. Still, the book is very interesting and a fun read. It's twelve chapters long; some of them are: The Model T Revolution in Society, Dissecting the Model T, The Popular Model T Aftermarket Industry, Model T Lore and Humor, The Model T goes Racing, Model T Memories and Stories, Preserving the Model T and Model T Prices Today. That's all interesting stuff. There's one available on half.com for less than $25 and that's a real bargain for a book of this heft and content.

By comparison, Lindsay Brooke's book is smaller, but the typeface also appears smaller, so I wouldn't be surprised if there exists between the covers the same volume of content as Collin's book. This isn't a "coffee-table book" and the hard cover beneath the dust jacket is blank. Brooke leans a little heavier on original, historical, black & white photos, but there's no shortage of color photos. Art direction and organization is great, but not surprisingly, the smaller typeface isn't especially easy to read. The publisher is Motorbooks.

Brooks book is 200+ pages long and yet is a bit more in-depth than Collin's book. Maybe this book is for an advanced beginner. Chapters include interesting sidebars, some of which outline major Ford Motor Company personalities like Charles Sorensen (who authored the book, "My Forty Years with Ford), William Knudsen and Ernest Kanzler. Like Collins, Brooks devotes a good deal of space to the differences in the various model years of the Model T.

Chapters include: Before the Model T, The Model T is Born, Tin Lizzie Evolves, Life with Lizzie, The T Goes Truckin', Racing and Rodding the T and Motel T's Second Century. This book is also available on half.com for under $25 and it's very well worth the money.

Neither book is anywhere near as comprehensive as "Model T Ford--The Car that Changed the World," by Bruce McCalley or "From Here to Obscurity," by Ray Miller and Bruce McCalley. In some ways, these two are somewhat similar, but there's enough difference to justify buying both and for the serious Model T hobbyist, both are essential. Best of all is Mr. McCalley's "Model T Ford--The Car that Changed the World."

Bob

Tom Collins book is filled with inaccuracies and is in general very poorly researched.The pictures are great though. You could buy it and line through the text, it would be a perfectly satisfactory book then.

I have not seen the Lindsay Brooke publication.

The Lindsay Brooke book is similar in format to the Time-Life series of books, and presents material that is found elsewhere but reads very well. Most of if not all of the black & white photos can be found in other books that are long out of print.

If you take the first part of Bruce's book, leave out the specialized material on car features and combine "Obscurity", "Model T Handbook" and a couple of others, and you have Brooke's Model T essay.

Very entertaining, but not a lot of material that I didn't already know.

I still think the third book is the best:
"The Model T, A Centennial History" by Robert Casey (John Hopkins University Press, currently at $17.13 at Amazon, in stock, 125 pages of text, plus notes for each chapter). The table of contents reads:
1. Automobility in 1908
2. Creating the Model T
3. Manufacturing the Model T
4. Selling the Model T
5. Owning and Driving the Model T
6. The Meaning of the Model T

Lots of nice pictures, no mistakes that I've noticed, very readable and provides good information about the Model T, especially for those new to the car. Maybe our various local chapters could buy a copy for the local libraries...
Joe

Thanks everyone for their replies. The book by Lindsay Brooke sounds more like what I'm after.

A may also get "The Model T: A pictorial chronology of the most famous car in the world" by Robert Kreipke. It got a good write-up in Hemmings.