Let’s Look Past The Borders Of This 1956 Opel Brochure

You know how a page is a sort of a window? Think about it: an illustration on a page has boundaries, contained by the physical borders of the page itself. In that sense, a physical page with an illustration is like a window into the artists’s vision, and whatever is beyond the boundaries of that page may be suggested by the art contained within the borders, but we don’t truly know.

We can speculate, though! No one can stop us from doing that, even though they’d love to, oh you know they would just love to keep us from seeing what’s beyond the thin fragile edges of those pages, but they can’t, you see, they can’t because they didn’t count on our tenacity and determination when it comes to looking at old car brochures and imagining what is going on just out of frame.

I’m not going to lie; there are a lot of people out there who would love to see me cower from, say, looking at this 1956 Opel Olympia brochure and just pretending like I’m not wondering what is happening just beyond the edges. They would love it if I never cast my eyes to the edges of these pages, never tried to process and infer the hidden goings-on in the no-space outside of the pages. But they’ll just have to be disappointed, because that is not what I’m going to do.

Let’s start with the image that got me thinking about all this:

Okay, that’s a page from the brochure, showing, as so many brochures love to do, just how much you can cram in the car’s trunk. But what feels weird is the position of the arms placing that last suitcase in as that fancy lady wearing a yellow dog bowl on her head looks on. The car isn’t that high off the ground; those arms at about knee-level for her? Really, the only way I can make sense of the position of those arms is if this is what was happening:

Someone is either leaping headlong to cram that suitcase in there rapidly, or floating about 14 inches above the ground to leisurely place the suitcase in there. Either way, those arms have to be attached to someone who is currently quite horizontal.

Let’s look at another one of these:

Here we see another view of the handsome Olympia, this time with the trunk closed, but likely soon to be open, as we see luggage approaching from two fronts: one a dapper fella in a suit, and then, mostly cut off, a kid, holding at least one suitcase. The Olympia’s lovely ribbed amber-and-red taillamps are on full display here, looking either like colorful gnocchi or a pair of caterpillars, maybe cocoons. Anyway, let’s extrapolate the rest of this image:

I knew it! There are some violations of child labor laws happening here! That kid can’t be more than, what, six, and look at all the crap they’re piling on them! I bet that kid hardly gets any breaks, too! This is atrocious; I’m reporting this to the Automotive Brochure Illustrated Child Welfare Bureau! This will not stand!

There’s another one, too:

Finally, we get to see the front of the damn car! Look at that smug Opel-pilot tooling through that exciting downtown, wet roads reflecting the city’s lights! But what is that business he seems to be driving away from?

Oh, right, it’s the famous European institution, FUCKN R! It’s basically like central Germany’s Dave & Buster’s, where you can go to get lit on schnapps and play unsettlingly realistic versions of Whack-a-Mole that use real, taxidermied moles. Sometimes the machines pump red-food-coloring-doped Karo syrup to act as blood, making the games a genuinely terrifying spectacle.

I don’t have a beyond-the-borders expansion of this lovely page of engine/suspension diagrams and inside looks at brake drums and transmissions. I just really like these illustrations. That drivetrain looks so oddly skeletal, though?