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I'm Jim Camp, the guy behind the synaesthesia press. I'm a letterpress printer, a publisher of limited-edition books and broadsides, and a lifelong book collector. I've been at this for close to 40 years, and most of what I'm offering here has lived on my shelves for decades. Now it's time for these books to move on to new homes. When one finds its way to your shelf, it'll arrive quickly, securely packed, and with no extra fees for shipping or handling. Oh, and don't be afraid to make an offer!Offering: The Guardsmen Golden Gate Road Races and Concours d’Elegance. San Francisco: The Guardsmen, June 5–6, 1954. Original illustrated race program.VG- in original illustrated stapled wrappers. Moderate general handling and shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to wrappers, small edge tears and chips, with age toning throughout. Staples holding; interior complete and generally clean and legible. Color pictorial front wrapper remains bright and attractive. Scarce.This is the program from the final Golden Gate Park road-racing weekend, June 5–6, 1954, when sports cars raced on a roughly three-mile circuit laid out directly through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The short-lived races were held from 1952 through 1954 and attracted an extraordinary variety of machinery—Ferrari, Jaguar, Porsche, MG, OSCA and home-built American specials among them. The 1954 event included a young Ken Miles, later one of the legendary figures of American sports-car racing, driving the Mercury-powered Troutman-Barnes Special.And the program itself is terrific. There’s a full two-page map of the Golden Gate Park circuit, along with period automotive advertising for Jaguar XK-120s, the Ford Thunderbird, Austin-Healey and Shell, plus wonderfully dated San Francisco advertising and promotions for other West Coast sports-car events. It captures that brief postwar moment when European sports cars, California hot-rod ingenuity and American road racing were colliding—and before racing through Golden Gate Park disappeared altogether. The surviving photographic record of the 1954 event includes everything from Ferrari 375 MMs to Kurtis specials and Ken Miles’s Troutman-Barnes machine.
A wonderful piece of early California sports-car history—and a program from the last time they ever raced through Golden Gate Park.
My best pieces never sit around for long, so click the heart on my store page to save me as a seller. I'm also the publisher behind thesynaesthesia press, known for its limited-edition books and broadsides, so when you buy here you're buying from a collector and letterpress printer who's been at this longer than I'd like to admit.
THANKS!
