Yahoo Autos This Automotive Bookstore Offers What the Digital Age Can't
Last year Amazon sold more than 300 million books in the U.S., and not one of them was the ecstatic hot-rod manual 4-Bangers! And Me! or Pegaso por Monsalve, a lush and loving tribute to Spain’s peak sports car. While Seattle’s overachieving online bookseller has broadened its mission to sell virtually everything to everyone, a corner store on an unremarkable retail strip in Burbank, California, has mastered the art of going deep. Since 1951, Autobooks-Aerobooks has been selling car-related (and, to a lesser degree, aviation-related) printed matter that’s hard to find anywhere else, even on Amazon.
This story originally appeared in Volume 23 of Road & Track.
“We are the ultimate niche market,” says Tina Van Curen, who bought the store in 2007 with her husband, Chuck Forward. “And if you’re going to survive as a small business, you’ve got to do something that not everybody else does.” Van Curen understands the commercial power of deep enthusiasm, including her own. She’s a Pasadena native, the daughter of a proto-hot-rodder who was building his own rides in the early Thirties. For years, Van Curen ran the Alfa Romeo Owners Club of Southern California. Forward, a retired aerospace engineer, helms the local Citroën group.
They know that it’s true obsessives who keep stores like theirs afloat in an era of TikTok and Uber. “There’s a whole generation of people who don’t know what books are for,” Van Curen says. “If it isn’t on the phone, they don’t know it’s there.”
Autobooks-Aerobooks is 2200 fluorescent-lit square feet of printed car porn, starting in the front window display, with its deep dives on the GT-R and hyperlocal photo books such as Van Nuys Blvd 1972, then moving back into shelves of manuals, memoirs, and biographies of racers, designers, and industry legends. Toward the middle of the store are a robust how-to section and a magazine rack that looks like it was lifted from Frankfurt Airport circa 1995. In the very back is a glass case where they keep the really good stuff—the limited-edition 911R and The Brothers Rodríguez, about the Mexican racing drivers.
Over the years, the store’s inventory has evolved along with the tastes of its owners, which currently means fewer big-block Chevys and more carrozzerie. “When we took over the store in 2007, the European-car section consisted of a couple of Jaguar books and a couple of Ferrari books. Now we have the Panhard books, you know, and the Bizzarrini and the Mangusta, and all of this stuff,” Van Curen says. “We just added to it. We still have the Mustang and Camaro books too.”
After all, Autobooks-Aerobooks is unmistakably American, a uniquely Californian creation. In the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, this stretch of Magnolia Boulevard was lined with hot-rod shops. “This was a hotbed of hot-rod building,” Forward explains. “It was also the hotbed of sports-car racing, despite what East Coast people say.”
The store was founded by Harry Morrow, who sold magazines and 500-cc racing manuals and also held the keys to Willow Springs Raceway in nearby Rosamond. “So if you wanted to go out and test your car,” Forward says, “you’d stop here and pick up the key for the gate.”
The store has been a gearhead haven ever since. Jay Leno is a frequent visitor, but he’s not the only marquee name to walk on the checkerboard-tiled floor. “You’re standing in the spot where Steve McQueen spent hours bench racing,” Forward tells me. (“It means bullshitting,” he clarifies.) “All the early racers kind of wandered in at that stage. There was nothing like this around.”
There still isn’t.
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