Age of the Automobile

London: Quartet Books. Very Good/Very Good. 1976. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0704321122 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 28 b/w photographs and illustrations on plates. 250 pages clean and tight. The internal combustion engine is only a little older than the twentieth century itself, and for better or worse it has done more to shape the character and development of the modern world than any other mechanical invention. As the nineteenth century was the age of the railway, therefore, so the twentieth century is the age of the automobile, and Harold Perkin follows the success of his fascinating book The Age of the Railway with this new history - not simply of developments in the motor car and its sinister cousins the tank and the warplane, but of their impact on British society in peace and war from Edwardian times to the present. 'The well-intentioned motor car', 'this lovable, prolific, congestive monster' is how he describes the vehicle which from its beginnings as the plaything of the wealthy has evolved and proliferated to change the lives of all of us, becoming a symbol at once of democracy and elitism, liberation and oppression, giving us access to the wide open spaces and the simple life while clogging and polluting our urban centres and remaining an index of rampant consumerism. The,author parallels the advance of the internal combustion engine in a way which is both enlightening and entertaining. The introduction of the tank broke the deadlock of the First World War, the long-range bomber brought home to civilian populations the concept of 'total war', and the use of the motor car has increased in direct proportion to the continual levelling of classes, the growth of the welfare state and the amelioration of human misery. But in the title of his famous book Sir Colin Buchanan called the motor car a'mixed blessing'. If its prevalence can be linked with greater affluence and mobility, it has nevertheless produced quite new problems, altering the shape - and even the purpose - of our towns and cities. Assembly-line production has created a highly sensitive and stress-ridden area of industry potentially damaging to individuals and the economy. Fuel and pollution crises threaten constantly. These new menaces, impossible to foresee seventy years ago, will mean still greater changes in society. And because this book is the history of an age still with us, Harold Perkin's final chapters look into the future and at the options open to us now to ensure that the automobile does not continue careering towards its - and our - destruction: .