Motor's Truck and Tractor Repair Manual, Fifth Edition, Hearst, Studebaker to John Deere, 1952

The Piece

The working mechanic's bible of the early postwar road and farm: Motor's Truck and Tractor Repair Manual, Fifth Edition, first printing, published by MOTOR, the automotive business magazine of the Hearst Corporation at 250 West 55th Street, New York, and copyrighted 1952. It is a heavy quarto bound in the olive green cloth the Motor manuals wore for a generation, the front board blocked in gilt within a double rule with the title and FIFTH EDITION, and below it the slogan the series carried through the war and after, Keep 'Em Rolling, with Motor's Repair Manuals. Inside are more than nine hundred pages of dense two-column text, exploded diagrams, sectional drawings and specification tables covering everything that hauled, plowed or pulled in America in the dozen years around the war.

The index tells the story. Stock engines: Buda, Continental, Hall-Scott, Hercules and Waukesha. Service sections on air brakes, carburetors, clutches, generators, hydraulic valve lifters, steering gears, torque dividers, transmissions and wheel alignment. Trucks: Autocar, Available, Biederman, Brockway, Brown, Chevrolet, Coleman, Corbitt, Dart, Diamond T, Divco, Dodge, Duplex, Fageol, Federal, Ford, FWD, GMC, Hendrickson, Hug, International, Kenworth, Kleiber, Mack and Mack Jr., Marmon-Herrington, Moreland, Oshkosh, Reo, Sterling, Stewart, Studebaker, Walter, Ward LaFrance, White and Willys. Farm tractors: Allis-Chalmers, B. F. Avery, J. I. Case, Ford, Ferguson, International Harvester, John Deere, Massey-Harris, Minneapolis-Moline and Oliver. The Studebaker lubrication chart, the Massey-Harris water pump, the Zenith carburetor and the Bendix-Westinghouse air brake valve are all here, drawn as the men who fixed them needed to see them.

Condition is good and honest for a shop manual that was used in a shop: the cloth sound and the gilt bright, with two pale ring stains to the front board where a coffee cup or an oil can sat, rubbing to the edges and corners, the spine square and the binding tight, the text block clean and lightly toned with no loose pages, tears or grease found in the sections examined. It has been read, not abused.

History & Provenance

MOTOR magazine was founded in 1903, bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1907, and spent the century as the trade paper of the American garage. Its annual Motor's Auto Repair Manual, first issued in 1937, put the factory service data for every make into one book that an independent mechanic could afford, and it became the standard reference of the trade; the Truck and Tractor Repair Manual followed in 1941 to do the same for the commercial and agricultural side, the heavy trucks of a dozen independent builders and the tractors that were mechanizing the American farm. Keep 'Em Rolling was the wartime slogan of the motor transport effort, when new vehicles were unobtainable and every truck and tractor in the country had to be kept running by repair, and Motor kept it on the cover for years afterward. The fifth edition of 1952 catches the heavy-truck industry at its most varied, before the consolidations of the 1950s and 1960s closed Federal, Brockway, Diamond T, Reo, Sterling, Corbitt, Available and the rest, and it is one of the last manuals to cover Studebaker trucks in full production.

The dating rests on the imprint rather than style alone: the title page states Fifth Edition, First Printing, published by MOTOR, 250 West 55th Street, New York 19, printed in the U.S.A., copyright 1952 by The Hearst Corporation, and the book is dated 1952.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Open it on a workbench, a coffee table or a bar and people stop to look: the exploded Studebaker, the air brake valve in section, the Massey-Harris water pump, drawn with a clarity that modern manuals lost. It is the book for a garage, a man cave, a ranch office, a truck or tractor restorer, a trucking or farm family, or a designer client styling an industrial loft, a cabin or a den with authentic mid-century reference books. The olive cloth and gilt sit handsomely in a stack of green and brown spines, and the content still answers real questions for anyone keeping a 1940s truck or tractor alive. For a shop it is the heavy, handsome, recognizable period reference that sells to the first man who opens it to his grandfather's make.