you know how very few people have a copy of the first year of Hot Rod magazine, but, because it pretty thoroughly documented the earliest hot rodders, a lot of people would like one? I found a simple cheap way to get a copy... they made a book of them

I've never seen or heard of this before... but it's the complete set, including covers, advertising, etc 

I bought this at the LA Roadster Show swap meet a couple weeks ago. 

I figured a few of you might want to know, so you too can read the first dozen issues. I've only ever read the reprint of the 1st issue, and only found the late 1949 through to now, issues to get a collection of my own to blog from 

This book can be bought on ABE books, or Ebay, or Amazon for between 30 and 50 dollars

in the swap meet at the LA Roadsters show today, at the Pomona Fairplex, I came across 3 full sets of Hot Rod magazine... this booth had one on hand, plus some other cool stuff! The (ASKING) going rate for a complete set is 1k. No one I talked to had a buyer yet

these binders are just a display sample to grab the passerby's attention. The rest were in the trailer 

Hot Rod magazines entire run of print magazines are online in a flip format

  https://www.hotrod.com/magazines/hot-rod/3169

Jim assembled a nearly complete collection of Hot Rod magazines, from the 1st, to 2014. A couple months ago, he put it up for sale, but of course, didn't say how much he was asking. No one ever does.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=9518539754858051&set=pcb.1016298887200864

I collected nearly all the regulars from mid 1949 and didn't stop holding onto them until about 2019 or so. The quality drastically fell off around 2015 or so. From 2004 to 2014 it was really fun. 

Hot Rod Magazine and MotorTrend have been sold to Hearst Media

All the brands that Motor Trend owned, are now Hearst's. 

Hearst already owned Car and Driver, Road and Track, and Popular Mechanics

Plus, King Features Syndicate, XM Sirius,  etc

Hearst is privately owned, not shareholder. 

https://www.hearst.com/-/hearst-magazines-acquires-motortrend-group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Hearst_Communications

Status of the car enthusiast world... ? Not so good, iconic magazine Hot Rod, and tv show Top Gear are over as we knew them

Top Gear just announced they are done. No plan to continue. https://www.thedrive.com/news/top-gear-is-officially-off-air-for-the-foreseeable-future

Hot Rod just announced no more monthly issues. Now, it, and Motor Trend, will be quarterly, and cost more for subscriptions, which I doubt, anyone is excited to pay, when obviously the future of Hot Rod Magazine is not long in the print version. https://help.motortrendondemand.com/hc/en-us/articles/21232231896461-MotorTrend-and-HOT-ROD-Magazine-Quarterly-Issues-Price-Increase-and-Customer-Offer

if you look at one of the recent issues of Hot Rod, it's half the size an issue was in 2010, and is full of ads, not of features on hot rods. 

Jim McFarland has passed away, he was the Hot Rod Magazine tech editor in 1966, editor in 67, and publisher in 1968... he left in 1969, unknowingly avoiding the OPEC crisis and insurance crunch, the vans and Vegas era, and worked for 20 years at Edelbrock

In the decades after his leaving the HOT ROD magazine staff, McFarland continued to write hundreds of tech articles and columns for HRM, Car Craft, Popular Hot Rodding, Circle Track, Motor Trend, and other publications.

International Drag Racing Hall of Fame's Founders Award in 2018. 

 2001 SEMA Hall of Fame Inductee

https://www.motortrend.com/news/jim-mcfarland-obit/

https://www.sema.org/news-media/enews/2023/41/industry-mourns-passing-sema-hall-inductee-jim-mcfarland-88

Thanks for letting me know George

'72 Nova I haven't seen Hot Rod Magazine ever mention, the Lee Eliminator (I love those slotted mags!) had a blue printed engine by Isky (I have never heard of Isky doing that) and a Tony Nancy interior! Damn, that's some serious celeb touched Nova!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185863675252

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185383569468

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185863677599

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10224567415074733&set=gm.981973689745124&idorvanity=226675368608297

https://www.facebook.com/CarterProPaint/posts/hot-rod-magazine-july-1972-hot-rod-lee-eliminator-nova-working-from-our-sketch-o/676416679837144/

Congrats to Brendon for getting a straight compliment and hero photo in the Hot Rod 75th Anniversary issue!

 getting a feature in ANY Hot Rod issue is just awesome, but then a back up mention in the big anniversary issue because you epitomize hot rodding? Just incredible! 

Hot Rod magazine did a muffler comparison back in 1973

 the readers loved it, because we want real world results that aren't faked because of advertisers that have to be catered to

A turbo Corvair muffler was judged the best

the advertisers screamed bloody murder because they had no skin in the game, and their products all failed to impress.... 

Since that one test, Hot Rod has NEVER had a comparison without an advertisers product winning

Read about it in the interviews with editors in the 75th anniversary magazine issue

Dodge had an interesting challenge for "influencers", build a Mopar dragster with a hellcat engine, in 4 weeks, and win a drag race against last years winner, who is also building a new race car. Hot Rod's team found a 55 Savoy

Part of the problem with these fake deadline to create drama scenarios made for tv, is that reality gets int he way, and with this, Covid showed up to create unneccesary adversity. Luckily, so many people on the build got covid at the same time, the majority of the build team was all infected at the same time, and simply moved the build to a offsite. They carried on. 

https://www.motortrend.com/events/1955-plymouth-savoy-build-roadkill-nights-alex-taylor-lucky-costa

https://www.dodgegarage.com/news/article/racing/2022/08/roadkill-repeat.html

Book Review: Hot Rod magazine 75 Years hardcover anniversary celebration

Amazon's preview gives you a good idea of what the book looks like all through the 9 chapters. 

203 pages, a look at decades of photographs of the cars and people that hot rodding history is made of,  at seven and a half decades, because the legends of So Cal hot rod journalists recorded the history as it happened, with milestones at the Bonneville Salt Flats, Pikes Peak, in drag racing, and through the early days of organized racing on the dry lake beds, and the horsepower wars of the ‘60s

It takes about 5 hours to read

1st impression, what a cool book to sum up the vast experience I, and other Hot Rod magazine readers have had every month, for decades. In a couple hours of reading you get taken back through 3/4s of a century of the magazine that most thoroughly covered American ingenuity of hot rodding cool cars

My complaints are from my expectations of the editors of Hot Rod magazine, and this book's editor and writer, to spell the names of Burt Munro correctly, and Elena Scherr, and to proofread the book to avoid mistaking fleet for feet, and chassisied for chassied. http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2022/11/reading-book-hot-rod-magazine-75-years.html

 Since I can find these, anyone who worked at HRM can, and should. OR the book maker Motorbooks and Quarto should accept my offer to proofread and find these mistakes for them before they get their books printed

Something I hadn't expected, is the insight into the editors of the magazine, and how they worked in the hot rodding aftermarket industry. One worked for Edelbrock, one for Schiefer clutches, etc

There was little mention of the celebs that have been featured in the magazine, as this book focused on the magazines production instead. I noticed that there was only a brief mention of Von Dutch, Ed Roth, Boyd Coddington, Dean Jeffries, George Barris, Gene Winfield, Smokey Yunick, Hot Rod Deluxe, and no mention of Jimmy Shine, The Smokers meet, Karl and Veda Orr, George Hurst, Riverside races, LA Roadster Show, Oakland Roadster Show, GNRS, etc. 

I was surprised to find that the earliest decade was not more focused on, and no mention was made of the fact that George Barris was one of the article writers. 

If you don't subscribe anymore, I sure don't blame you, because the glory days of Hot Rod are long over. It's intellectual property and investment value can't be underestimated though, and several pages of the book talk about the number of times in the past twenty years that Hot Rod has been bought, sold, flipped, and underbudgeted by the newest owners because no one is running it for it's present or future glory. There are only 4 people on staff, and I expect it to stop being a printed magazine within a year due to the business of money first, legacy last, and the change of culture of the automotive world now that state and federal govt pushes for quiet electric cars, and the bonkers days of dealership race cars seems to be winding down. 

reading the book Hot Rod Magazine, 75 years... and the first thing I notice they screwed up, was spelling Burt Munro's first name correctly

 Why doesn't anyone have the sense to have me proof read their book if it has anything to do with what I've focused on for the past 16 years ? 

By the way, it was written by former Hot Rod editor Drew Hardin. You'd think he'd get legendary people's names right, OR get someone to proof read his book, that knows how to spell BURT not BERT. Book editors in some New York office don't know shit about Burt Munro. 

But this wasn't the only easy to find error of a someone he should know the spelling of, Elena, a Hot Rod staffer, also was misspelled:

and the well known people's names weren't the only spelling errors that those that rely on Spellcheck missed:

and they misspelled chassisied

and how do you forget that you're talking about the J2000, before the end of the paragraph?

this is the clamshell cam I was talking about, Mike

Beginning Nov. 1, all 74 years of Hot Rod Magazines will be available online, free, in PDF format, on MotorTrend+... provided you sign up for an account with Motor Trend. I guess that means getting their app? Or accessing through their website

Hot Rod says they’ve digitized more than 128,000 pages of their magazine from more than 900 issues. That’s hundreds of thousands of photos, ads, and books of stories

https://www.thedrive.com/news/hot-rod-magazine-will-post-every-from-1948-to-2021-online-for-free

https://www.motortrend.com/news/hot-rod-magazine-archive-release/

looks like the Hot Rod Magazine archives are done posting to facebook, but they did put some cool stuff up to look through.

Bela Lugosi Jr, son of the famous actor, chose a unique supercharged Shelby GT350 Mustang back in 1977 as his performance piece.  Photographed by Gray Baskerville and featured in the November 1977 issue of Hot Rod. He drove it on the streets of Los Angeles and on the track with the Shelby club

https://www.facebook.com/Petersen.Photo.Archive

built, not bought, this 39 Buick was a derelict that Stanley "Hot Rod" Chavik transformed into the Shafer 8, an Indy racer replica, in Zlín, Czechia (Czech Republic) ... and then he and his wife moved to California in 2017 with it!

 

In 2003, after years of internet fantasizing, he opened Hot Rod Chavik, a welding and fabrication shop in the industrial town of Zlín, Czechia.

While in Zlín, Stanley acquired a derelict 1939 Buick that he transformed into the Shafer 8, an Indy racer replica akin to the camera-ready creations of his internet heroes. Everything on Stanley's tribute to Phil Shafer, who built and raced at Indy in the 1930s—from the body, with its classic boat-tailed torpedo shape, to the horse-collar grille—came from the mind and hands of this metalworking Dr. Frankenstein. 

The Buick's thundering straight-eight, which Stanley rebuilt to the tune of 200 hp, got a custom intake that maintains four Stromberg 97 carbs, which Stanley magically conjured into the Czech Republic thanks to more internet magic. 

 Finally, in 2017, Stanley and his growing family, which now included his petite dynamo of a wife, Daisy, and their son Stanley Jr., moved from the Czech Republic to a sunny suburb in Orange County, California, with not much more than their clothes, a U.S. E-2 visa for new businesses, and their show car.

And now he's been featured in Hagerty and Hot Rod Magazine!  (the American dream, to make something cool, and succeed, and be recognized and respected!)

https://www.facebook.com/speedstersbyChavik

https://www.motortrend.com/features/chavik-hot-rods-custom-cars

https://www.hagerty.com/media/magazine-features/coming-to-america-czech-hot-rodders-find-their-place-in-the-sun/