Title: Buses and Coaches 1945-70 from contemporary adverts
Author: Gavin Booth
Publisher: Key Books
ISBN: 978-1-80282-384-4
Specification: 240mm x 170mm, 96pp, softback
Price: £15.99
Gavin Booth has collected the advertisements with which chassis and bodybuilders, sometimes suppliers of components and consumables, have promoted themselves in trade magazines over the years and has selected around 170 to provide a novel view of the vehicles on offer in the quarter century after the end of World War Two and the sales messages they relayed. Most show vehicles, sometimes with exaggerated dimensions to suggest a product more sleek and aerodynamic than the real thing, and a few also make exaggerated claims about what those products might achieve. There were exceptions, such as Lockheed hiring a yetto-be-famous but instantly recognisable if young Roger Moore in 1952 to promote hydraulic brake fluid, a liquid his 1970s and 1980s James Bond would surely have insisted be shaken, not stirred.
Big players like Leyland, AEC, Daimler, Duple and Plaxton bought much of the advertising space all year and every year, while others had less generous budgets. Alexander confined its spend to the week of major exhibitions …
