Right before we left Monterey and the Concours d’Elegance last week, a reader named Vitaly reached out to me to let me know he’d be there, too, and not just there, he had an incredible old little magazine/booklet to give me about, of course, taillights. We were finally able to find Vitaly and his family, loitering by the concept cars, and he gave me this remarkable little slim volume, which was actually written by George Barris, the legendary customizer and maker of the Batmobile, among many other cars, and some cars that maybe he just took credit for. But that’s another story. Anway, let’s peek at this book!
The book is part of the Hot Rod technical library, and is essentially a small how-to guide and idea book for making more exciting taillights for your customized car, were you a car customizer around in, oh, the mid 1950s, I think. I can’t find a publication date on this, but it has to be prior to 1967 because the phone number listed is HOllywood 6-2111, and those types of numbers were replaced with seven-digit ones in 1967.
A lot of what the book shows is creative ways to mix-and-match taillight lenses from various automakers, repurpose them, re-orient them, double them up, and so on for some really dramatic effects:
I mean, look at all of these exciting variations! Frenched in, bolt-on, modified lenses, swapped makes, surface detailing, everything. And they even cover some scratch-made taillights, including this example on, of all car, Dean Jeffries’ own Porsche:
Dean Jeffries was a famous car customizer himself, building cars like the Monkeemobile and the Mantaray, and his Porsche work includes doing the painting on James Dean’s Little Bastard Porsche.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating book, and I appreciate it, Vitaly! We may have given Vitaly and his family our press wristbands, too, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.
I would absolutely read an article about trying some of these ideas out on any Autopian project cars, just sayin’…
Actually I’d love to read any articles about how custom cars from back in the day were built, since there was a lot of creativity and art to it.
At custom car shows I like to point out the ‘56 Packard taillights. The cars are gone but the taillights live on.
It’s interesting, but it’s also safe to assume that it was published long before FMVSS108 was codified into federal law. So while tail light swapping is still legal, building your own from scratch probably isn’t.
Vitaly here. Jason, thanks so much for the shoutout but so not necessary! I was just glad I found something for you. I did want to let the other members here know that meeting Jason, David, and Matt was just a such a highlight! They were so incredibly nice and generous! My Pebble Beach experience was just beyond compare. Already prepping for next year. I really cannot recommend the show enough to the other readers and members here. For the Pebble Beach show, itself, the real highlight was being able to see automotive history made “real”. As in just driving down the road. The noises, the smells, and meeting the people who love and appreciate them.
I do want to take 1 second and recommend that people purchase membership to this site. No, none of the staff are asking me to write this. This site is a treasure and it would be great to see people support it as much as they can. My daughter got into cars when we watched the old Jason Drives videos together because of the mix of humor and cars. I wanted to thank Jason for helping automotive culture stay relevant for the new generation like my 13-year old. Thanks Jason, David, Matt and the rest of the Autopian crew!
Awesome feedback, and is a cool validation point for those of us who haven’t met anyone on the Autopian team but feel like we probably have a decent feel for who they are. Now I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for cool tail light books like this when I’m hitting vintage swap meets.
Coolest thing I’ve found to this point was a hand-illustrated GNU Emacs manual from Richard Stallman (sent to the Open-Source Museum!), but similar principle. It’s super fun to find something that you know other aficionados (or maniacs like Jason) will appreciate and let it be seen!
Wow what a great gift, and the perfect person to give it to!
I love everything with George Barris. What a cool guy 😎
Torch needs some alone time to read. 🙂
Does this count as autoerotica for Jason?
Autoerotic affxiation?
HOllywood 6-2111, and those types of numbers were replaced with seven-digit ones in 1967 isn’t this a 7-digit phone number? (466-2111).
Maybe i’m reading it wrong, but when i hear the old movie phone #’s it’s always something like Lennox 5555 or Greenwich 555, and i always thought it was 2 letters (convertible to digits) followed by 2-4 spoken digits.
In my lifetime, i’ve always had to say 7 or 10 digits, except for the party line at my grandparents village in Canada (four digits, or a family name, worked with the operator).
That’s it. The fake movie/TV number as an example, KLondike 5-5555, where KLondike was the name of the exchange. Eventually they started adding more prefixes which didn’t neatly map to names and we went to listing all the numbers instead.
That’s right, I think he just meant when AT&T started de-emphasizing exchange names in favor of people just using the numbers, which was in preparation for a wider rollout of mandatory area code use and the resulting switch to 10 digit dialing in many areas
As a kid, mine was VAndyke-2, we stuck with 7 digit dialing well into the 1980s, and the state I live in now only went to 10 digits a couple years ago
Real men in Hollywood would just bark at their secretaries to get so and so on the line for them. Now we just use speed dial. Most days, I’m hard pressed to remember my own number.
There were only two exchanges in my area up to the 80’s, 699 and 695, so until the new exchange was added we only dialed 5 numbers.
And recently some idiots decided we needed to dial 1+area code in order to call the house next door!
Cover car – 1957 Lincoln tailfin?
I’m fascinated by the ’58 Edsel station wagon boomerang light on the ’58-’60 Thunderbird.
Torch, imagine a near future where “murdering out” Chevrolet Equinoxes and putting big grilles and angry headlights on Toyota Corollas goes out of fashion…
…and fins become all the rage again!
How would we make all the popular vehicles on the road, uh, more finnish?
Built-in saunas and salted licorice dispensers?
Diagonal fins protruding from the sides just below the rear windows would be doable, or putting fins on the roof.
Jason, here’s a thought that may send your already-spinning mind into a such a twirl that it ultimately becomes its own gravitational force, collapses in on itself, turns into a black hole and wipes out the galaxy. But I’m gonna ask it anyway.
Based on the methodologies in this magazine, what taillights would you choose to graft onto the Changli?
That gift should get Vitaly a lifetime cover charge waiver at the Lumière Rouge.
I would totally take that!
I think this calls for a new challenge for The Bishop:
What if tailfins never went away from car design?
I would love to know what my old family minivan (‘94 Villager) would have looked like with fins and those phallic red taillights that jutted out the back.
Remember in the early 2000s when Pontiac dipped its toe back in the water with some little winglets on I think the Grand Am’s spoiler?
It was fairly bold, but yet fit perfectly with Pontiac’s “ribbed for no one’s pleasure” design ethos that soon went away.
Mom’s Cadillac SRX seemed to have vestigial fins in the taillight design. Just a little, subtle point.
I’m very pro-brougham and pro-fin. Bring back broughams with cool fins.
After having taken a chainsaw to your Changli’s batteries it might not be a bad idea for you to minimize any further exposure to lead by avoiding some of those techniques since these often involved copious amounts of good ol’ Pb…
I have visions of Torch thumbing thru this at night in his bed with the covers pulled over his head and a flashlight. I mean he must be as excited as a 60’s teenager who stumbles across his dad’s playboy collection
I can see it now. Picture it, Torch’s house:
Jason’s wife calls from the other room:
“Jason! You’re not reading that taillight book in bed again, are you?!”
“Um, no, I’m…uh, just looking at the JC Penney catalogs…”
“Good, because if I catch you with that again, so help me…”
If we don’t hear anything from Torch for the next couple of weeks, it’s because he is going to every library in the nation looking for more of these magazines on microfilm.
Raise your hand if you have used microfilm so those danged Gen Z kids can laugh at you for being old. My hand is already raised.
I recall the microfiche in the university library and in the blueprint rooms of various employers.
Oy. Your mention of blueprints gave me an immediate flashback to making drawings on vellum into blueprints using a giant ammonia-based UV copier. I think the memory of the fumes just gave me a headache…
Not microfilms, but many a microfiche before engineering dwg archives began scanning them.
oh god, those stupid things used to make me so motion sick
The last time I used it was in high school. My college had the internet so by that time there was no need.
My college was in the middle of digitizing everything while I was there. You had this room full of computers, and there I was with my head inside this giant thing that had nothing more sophisticated than lenses and a lightbulb. They at least figured out how to make it work with a printer so I could take stuff back with me.
That might have been microfiche? I can never remember the difference between that and microfilm. It all came on these rolls and you used a hand crank to change pages.
I might be getting them confused too. I just know they were a pain in the ass to deal with and having the internet, even if it was slow as hell, was a vast improvement.
If it’s on a reel, it’s microfilm. If it’s a flat sheet, it’s microfiche:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/libapps/accounts/99112/images/microfiche3.jpg
Sorry for the small image but, well, you know…
I started my current job fresh out of college about 16 years ago, and I regularly had to fire up the microfiche viewer/printer to retrieve old drawings of various engine parts. It finally quit working, so the company had to pay to have everything digitized.
My wife used to work for a company that did digital archiving. They would get sent microfilm and microfiche for publications that originally went out in the 19th century, and sometimes even paper copies that old. They also digitized new material for magazines, and one of their occasional customers was Playboy. My wife didn’t particularly like having to slowly line up centerfold body parts so you wouldn’t get an interruption in the green version, but work is work. Men expect to have the boobs lined up just right before they will dignify the image by wanking to it.
For several years I actually had a side-gig microfiching old N&W Train Reports for their archives. Easy, but tedious. Great because of truly flexible hours. An, um, rather informal place: the owner imbibed-not even kidding here-2 5ths of vodka each day, and everyone had their own particular thing, from weed to coke to psychedelics.
-a contractor, to be clear: not the train company itself
That book is amazing. Looking at its contents feels like being admitted into a secret cult, with all their arcane secrets finally revealed.
Jason, what your Changli really needs is a pair of bullet taillights from a ’59 Caddy. Or some fins grafted on from a similar vintage Chrysler, complete with taillights.
Or some jet exhaust taillights from an old Ford g Galaxie!!
The possibilities are endless!!