With the acquisition of the archives of Road & Track magazine, we at the Stanford Libraries are racing ahead in support of automotive research and history – viz. the Revs Program – at Stanford.

If you were browsing the Automotive section of the New York Times last Sunday, you might have been surprised to find there a substantial article about a Stanford Libraries coup: we have acquired a truly remarkable, quite untraditional, trove of research material, the archives of Road & Track magazine (a gift from Hearst Publishing). “Road & Track,¹ which dates back to 1947, was perhaps the most influential American automotive publication after World War II. It is considered the first to have taken a mature — almost New Yorker-like — approach to automotive journalism, said Reilly P. Brennan, the executive director of the Revs Program.”

The Revs Program at Stanford was established in 2010 with a generous gift from the Revs Institute for Automotive Research in Naples, Florida, itself the labor-of-love of car collector and scholar Miles Collier. A parallel gift is helping the Libraries develop a research website and populate digital archives of automotive material. Thus, there has been a close working relationship between the Revs Program and the Libraries from the starting line, as shown by the Road & Track acquisition.

This article was taken in part from the December 13th edition of ReMix: The Stanford University Libraries News, written by Andrew Herkovic.

Click here to read the article in its entirety.

See also: the Stanford Report article, The archives of Road & Track magazine come to Stanford.