Summer Reading: Every Chevy Enthusiast Needs to Read this Book
Larry Edsall’s Chevrolet Trucks: 100 Years of Building the Future provides an unmatched history of all of Chevy’s trucks.
Pickup truck fans are some of the most die-hard consumers on the planet. Choosing between pickup trucks from the Big Three – Ford, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, and General Motors – can break families apart, as loyalty runs deep for truck owners. Chevrolet has been engineering trucks since 1917, making it one of the oldest pickup-truck manufacturers on the road today. For Chevy fans looking to get some more insight behind the history of the automaker’s trucks, we may have just found the perfect book.
Larry Edsall’s forthcoming book, “Chevrolet Trucks: 100 Years of Building the Future,” is a must-read for any Chevy fan, as the book provides a detailed look at all of the automaker’s models. After reading the book from cover to cover, we can firmly state that it’s well worth the $40 price tag.
Edsall is a well-known writer in the automotive industry that has written for various publications, including Autoweek and The New York Times and has penned more than 15 books, as well. The author brought out all of the stops for the latest book and it starts off with a bang. Alan Batey, Global Head of Chevrolet, wrote the foreword for the book, revealing just how close Edsall got to the automakers to get the facts straight.
While the majority of truck enthusiasts will know how Chevrolet got into manufacturing trucks, Edsall’s book goes into excruciating detail. Some of Chevrolet’s first trucks, the Model T, shared a lot of the same components as the automaker’s regular vehicles.
“Those first trucks were open-cab vehicles using the same cowls and flat, but rear-slanting, windshields as Chevrolet’s cloth-topped, open-sided passenger cars,” says Edsall. “Standard equipment included a speedometer, ammeter, tire pump, electric horn, and twelve-spoke hickory-wood wheels with demountable rims, as well as other essentials.”
And Edsall continues to provide the same amount of detail throughout the book, as he takes readers through time. During the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, Chevrolet received specialized truck bodies from other suppliers, which the author covers in great detail.
“A catalog for the Brooklyn Commercial Body Co., produced late in the 1910s, shows the company’s specialized truck bodies: Style 100 Furniture Body, Style 105 Stake Body, Style 113 Panel Body, Style 115 Six-Post Express, Style 119 Cabin Express body, and Style 120 Combination Passenger Express,” says Edsall.
To complement the incredible amount of history in the book, Edsall also managed to get pictures of old Chevrolet advertisements, trucks from the automaker’s private collection, and real-life examples from the wild. The pictures alone are worth the cost of entry, as they go beyond perfect trucks and include snapshots of vehicles being made, clay models, and even changes in design.
While the dense amount of information in the book may draw some readers away after a few chapters, Edsall breaks up the information by adding anecdotes about individuals that played a major role for making some of Chevy’s trucks.
One of the more memorable stories is of Chuck Jordan, the designer behind the Cameo Carrier from the ‘50s. “The Cameo Carrier’s design was penned by Chuck Jordan, who grew up helping in his grandparents’ orange groves in Southern California, where Jordan learned to drive his grandfather’s big 12-speed Moreland truck and became fascinated with large work vehicles,” says Edsall.
“Jordan wanted to be a car designer. He thought it would be advantageous to understand the mechanical aspects of such vehicles. He studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but didn’t neglect his design education, returning home each summer to attend the Chouianrd Institute of Art in Los Angeles.”
“At age 19, Jordan won the national first prize in the Gernal Motors Fisher Body Craftsman Guild’s model-building content and got to spend four days at the GM design studios in Detroit, where he was essentially promised a job after his graduation in 1948. Because of his interest in trucks (the title of his graduate thesis at MIT was ‘Heavy-Duty Mack Truck Styling’), he was assigned to Lu Stier’s truck studio, where he led design for the production version of the Cameo Carrier.”
Readers willing to get through the entire book are treated to various stories like Jordan’s. But the anecdotes also expand to special journeys and records that individuals broke with Chevy trucks.
“On October 26-27, 1989, a Chevrolet pickup truck arrived at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from the assembly line at Fort Wayne, Indiana,” says Edsall. “At the Speedway, the truck broke a 37-year-old production car record by averaging 103.463 miles per hour for 24 hours in laps around the 2.5-mile oval. Stopping only for fuel, tire, and driver changes, the truck, a C1500 Sport, traveled 993.234 laps, nearly 2,500 miles around the Brickyard, and was awarded the Hulman Indy Challenge Trophy.”
While the book is clearly aimed at Chevy truck enthusiasts, anyone could pickup the book and enjoy reading it. And for individuals that are really only interested in a certain generation of pickups, the fact that the book is written in chronological order makes it easy to find a specific era of trucks and get all of the information without having to go through the entire thing, if that’s something that you would want to do.
If Chevrolet built a truck or upgraded one of its pickups from 1917 to 2017, you can bet your bottom dollar that the information made its way into the book. It’s one of the most comprehensive books we’ve ever read and the way that it’s put together – having interesting stories mixed in with some truly incredible photos – makes it a book that we can easily recommend for not only Chevy fans, but for all automotive enthusiasts.