Books
Joseph Figoni Volume One: Alfa Romeo
PETER M LARSEN & BEN ERICKSON, Moteurs!, £195, ISBN 978 8 797288 20 7
It sometimes feels a little perverse to award Book of the Month status to a pricey, limited-edition work that relatively few people can afford. You have to really want a book like this to justify spending the thick end of 200 quid on it.
However, it would be even more perverse to exclude such a book on the grounds of elitism. This hefty hardback is, literally, a work of art and as such fully deserves its equally hefty price tag. What’s more, it is pretty much guaranteed only to go up in value rather than down, which may be a useful bargaining chip on the domestic front.
What we have here is the first volume in a of the chassis bodied by notable Parisian Joseph Herménégilde Louis Figoni. This one is devoted to Alfa-Romeo (the name was hyphenated back then); the next will be on Bugatti, followed by separate books on Delage, Delahaye and Talbot-Lago. The series will be rounded off by an A-Z of miscellaneous other Figoni-bodied marques and a biography of Figoni. As the authors admit, ‘It is a big project’.
