The Impossible Collection of Cars

The Library Essay

One Hundred Machines Worth the Century

Dan Neil, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his automotive criticism, was set the Ultimate Collection's standing task: choose the hundred cars of the twentieth century that a collector with no constraints would gather, from the brass-era pioneers through the coachbuilt thirties to the racing and supercar decades. His selections are argued, not listed, in the sharp comic prose that earned him the prize.

Assouline published the volume in 2011 in its hand-bound large format. Like the best of the series it is a provocation dressed as an inventory; every reader with petrol sympathies will find omissions to protest, which is the entertainment, and along the way the century's industrial story gets told through its most emotional machines.