An Incredible Collection Of Car Drawings From Legendary Designers Was Bought For Two Cases Of Light Beer

What was the last thing you bought for two cases of cheap beer? About 80% of a trampoline? The silence of your little brother after he walked into your room without knocking that time when you were home from college? Whatever it was, I bet it wasn’t remotely as cool as what a gentleman named Josh Quick got for two cases of Busch Light, paid to someone clearing out an old barn in upstate New York. That’s because what Quick got is about as cool as you can get: styling sketches of future Buicks, drawn in 1940 by young designers, some of whom went on to design some legendary cars.

Quick was looking for antique tractor parts, and he got those, but he also ended up with a binder, one that had improbably avoided becoming a side dish or bedding material for rats, and that binder had 80 pages of drawings of cars, all from 1940, and all showing styling ideas for a hypothetical future 1942 Buick.

The timing here is interesting, too, as America had yet to fully enter WWII, which brought civilian car production to a halt for the duration. The early 1940s were not a time when all-new American civilian cars were a thing.

The pages were from the Detroit Institute of Automobile Styling, GM’s training ground for future designers, and this must have been an assignment. Students at the Institute would go on to become automotive designers and executives, so seeing these early works of theirs has the same sort of exciting, before-they-were-big feeling as, say, seeing a sketch from Jackson Pollock’s early years, before his signature style had been developed.

Take this one, from Elwood Engel, who was a designer at Ford and then became Chrysler’s Chief Designer from 1961 to 1964, and whom I just wrote about as being the designer whose cars inspired the new Fantastic Four movie car.

I love how this sketch really leans into that severe Dutch angle, along with the stylized bridge in the background with its futuristic cable car. The car itself isn’t necessarily all that radical a design when you think about what the ’40s would bring, but it’s all lowered and wide and an exaggerated ideal of what would come.

Engel’s sketches were wonderful compositions, with real attention paid to backgrounds to set a mood. This one is interesting in that it has no wheelarches and a bulbous look, like what late ’40s Nashes would employ, and those vertical oblong side grilles that blend into the bumper designs are interesting.

Some designs were more successful than others. This one from Ed Glowacke, who became Cadillac’s chief designer from 1951 to 1957, some of Cadillac’s most iconic years, has a sort of blobfish look. The fighter plane in the background suggests at what the goals were, but I’m not sure they were achieved, really. If the goal was a colossal, fast, robot slug, though, then mission accomplished.

There’s a few studies that seem to be focused on grille design from Ned Nickles, who, among other achievements, designed what may be one of the most stunning American cars ever, the 1963 Buick Riviera:

That 1940 sketch from Nickels feels like what both Ford and Studebaker were doing in their early postwar cars, but Nickels didn’t stop there with his grillesplorations. Look at this:

Why not have a huge ring in front of the grille? I guess this more of a bumper experiment than a grille one, but still, that’s some radical thinking that would have made me want to petition DMV to start making round license plates.

Look at this one! It feels like an electric stovetop burner! Exciting stuff. Here’s another big name you may know of; I know you know their work:

This Buick, which features a grille that reminds me of a skyscraper’s windows, somehow, was drawn by Joe Oros, the chief designer of the original 1964/1965 Ford Mustang.

This interesting front end design, where the grille and bumper merge into one unified form, came from the mind of Eugene Bordinat, who was chief of design at Ford, and led the design of the 1958 to 1960 Continentals, the Falcon, Maverick, and Pinto, among others.

There’s many more examples to be seen, and you can see them at GM’s site, which I encourage you to do. A find like this is an improbability on par with finding a raccoon that speaks Dutch in a bowl of onion dip, and that same raccoon knows your little brother, and knows what he saw. So maybe you owe him two cases of cheap beer, too.