"Maserati Road Cars"

“Maserati Road Cars” by Richard Crump and Rob de la Rive Box. 229 pp., 11″ x 10″. (Osprey Publishing Ltd., 12-14 Long Acre, London WC2E 9LP. £14.95).

What this large book sets out to do is to cover mainly Maserati’s Orsi period. Information was collected world-wide, and anyway Rob of the Rive Box is in business selling and servicing Maseratis, and supplying spares for them. So the book is about the road-going cars from 1946 to 1979, illustrated with close to 500 pictures, some in colour. The different chapters deal with the small capacity sixes which were made between 1946 and 1957, the 3500 series, and the V8s and V6s in road-burning guise. There is also some information about prototypes and odd models. A production chart and graph, broken down into the different models, shows that less than 10,000 Maseratis have been made to date.

The book is outspoken about some of the 16 Maserati models and it has unusual illustrative material, such as reproductions of many Maserati advertisements, commencing with those for the Company’s batteries and sparking plugs (I confess I do not have a Maserati plug in my collection), relevant press cuttings, and reproductions of many pages from Maserati manuals, calling for use of a magnifying glass to study them in comfort.

The publishers, who call this work “an offering nothing short of miraculous”, believe in large illustrations and do not cramp these — indeed, they seem to have plenty of paper to spare. The photographers and art-technicians seem to have done most of the work in this attractive Maserati offering, which sets out to explain why this make has survived no many set-backs and attacks.

W.B.