Cars have been photographed, drawn, art-directed, lithographed and bound for more than a century, and the paper is frequently more interesting than the machinery. This is a journal about that paper. It is published in issues because that is how the material it covers was published.
Issue 04
Keeping It
May 2026
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Magazines & Annuals
Why the Car Is Always on a Hill
Motoring photography settled on about five compositions by 1960 and has barely moved since. Each of them is solving a specific problem.
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Brochures & Manuals
Collecting Paper Without Buying Rubbish
Motoring print is one of the last genuinely cheap collecting fields, which means most of what is offered is worth what it costs, which is nothing.
Issue 03
The Long Read
April 2026
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Magazines & Annuals
The Motoring Annual as a Genre
A yearbook that nobody needed, published for eighty years, and now the most useful primary source for anyone trying to work out what a year actually looked like.
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Magazines & Annuals
Road Test Prose and How It Changed
The house style went from engineering report to first-person adventure in about fifteen years, and you can date an unmarked page from the verbs alone.
Issue 02
On the Wall
February 2026 – March 2026
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Posters & Advertising
The Golden Age of Motoring Poster Art
Between the wars the motor poster was the most advanced commercial art in Europe, and the reason was a printing constraint rather than a movement.
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Posters & Advertising
Three Seconds at Eighty Miles an Hour
Roadside advertising had to be legible to someone travelling past it, and that single requirement produced most of the design rules we still use.
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Posters & Advertising
Four Colours and What They Could Not Do
Almost every printed image you have ever seen is four inks pretending to be a spectrum, and the places where the pretence fails explain a lot about old print.
Issue 01
The Sales Pitch
January 2026 – February 2026
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Brochures & Manuals
Why Car Brochures Were Art-Directed Like Fashion Shoots
For thirty years the most expensive photography in Britain was not in magazines. It was in something given away free at a dealership.
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Brochures & Manuals
Paper Stock and the Feel of Money
The single clearest signal of what a car cost is not in the photography. It is in the weight and finish of the sheet it was printed on.
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Brochures & Manuals
The Exploded Diagram
The workshop manual invented a way of drawing that has since been borrowed by furniture makers, software documentation and everyone who has ever assembled a flat pack.
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