The history of automotive enthusiasm stretches back a surprisingly long way. Your parents weren’t the first ones reading magazines and dreaming about cars.
That’s a point proven by the Petersen Automotive Museum‘s latest YouTube series. The unboxing videos take a look back through the history of automotive publishing, taking some of the world’s oldest car magazines out of the archive for all to see.
It’s fascinating to see how, in 1910 enthusiast magazines didn’t focus just on the vehicles, but on routes, too. It’s an enlightening look into what it meant to own a car during the brass era.
The series has more than just old magazines, though. The museum’s founder, Robert Petersen, was also a publisher, and as such its archive contains behind-the-scenes content from the hot rod era.
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One mock-up of the 1947 Hot Rod Magazine November issue shows how they made magazines before computers. With a hand-drawn cover and penciled-in notes throughout, the piece is as much an automotive historical document as it is a window into the world of mid-century publishing.
There’s even a card with ad rates for the magazine that shows what the business of magazines was like back then. A full-page ad for $125 in 1947 works out to about $1,500 in today’s money.
The archive is also full of treasures that were never published, like its 10 million photo negatives. Photographers at an event might take a full roll of pictures and send the whole thing back to the magazine, which would only publish the best two or three, say.
Fortunately, there are more than a million digital images accessible to the general public through the Petersen Automotive Museum website.