Resources
Free Resources
Some of the best material in the car world is free — if you know where it’s buried. This page preserves and expands two of our most-requested guides: how to value automotive art you intend to sell, and the online treasures car guys rarely find before page 14 of a search.
What Can You Get for Your Automotive Art?
We offer the following tips to help you value artwork you intend to sell:
- Identify the artist and the market. An artist with concours exhibition history, society membership or museum placements has an established secondary market; a talented unknown does not. Search recent auction results for the artist’s name before setting expectations.
- Edition matters. An original painting is one of one. A signed and numbered limited print (say, 1 of 250) carries meaningful value; an open-edition reproduction carries decorative value only. Check the margin for a pencil signature and edition fraction.
- Condition is king. Fading from UV exposure, foxing (brown spots), water ripples and trimmed margins all cut value sharply. Honest grading saves everyone time.
- Provenance helps. Original purchase receipts, gallery labels and certificates of authenticity add confidence and dollars.
- Comparable sales beat opinions. Auction archives and dealer listings for the same artist, similar size and similar subject are your real-world price guide.
The Guide to Car-Guy Websites Buried in Google
This is our guide to online resources car people want to know about but probably don’t — compiled from reader and colleague input, then verified. Treasures you might otherwise never find:
- Revs Institute — the Naples, Florida institution behind one of the world’s great automotive research libraries. Its digital library puts hundreds of thousands of period racing photographs online, free.
- International Motor Racing Research Center — archives of programs, photos and films covering nearly a century of motorsport. See our companion piece on 90 years of racing history on your screen.
- Library of Congress — the Prints & Photographs reading room holds early motoring photography and a deep poster archive, much of it digitized in high resolution.
- Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum — one of the finest racing sports car collections anywhere, with generous online documentation of each machine’s history.
- Antique Automobile Club of America — its library and research center answers literature questions and preserves factory documentation for hundreds of marques. Manual hunters, start here (then read our owner’s manual guide).
- Marque clubs and registers — nearly every classic marque has a club maintaining production records, chassis registers and technical archives that no search engine surfaces. If you own or research a specific make, its register is usually the single deepest source alive, staffed by volunteers who answer questions out of pure love.
- Auction house archives — the major collector-car auction houses keep years of past catalog listings online, complete with provenance research, condition photography and realized prices. For valuing art, models or cars, these archives are an education in what documentation looks like when money depends on it.
How to Use These Archives
Three practical ideas from our readers: artists and modelers use period photo archives to verify liveries, colors and details before committing paint; restorers pull factory literature to settle originality arguments; and plain enthusiasts simply lose entire evenings to 1930s Grand Prix photography, which we consider time excellently spent. Bookmark generously — these institutions survive on attention and donations, and they have earned both.
Found a buried treasure we missed? The journal was built on reader tips exactly like that.