Bangshift.com, Review May 4, 2009
"Some books you buy for the words and some you buy for the pictures. Hot Rod Garages by Peter Vincent has words, but the incredible photography tells the stories that the book is trying to tell. This is an awesome look into the workshops of some of the most talented car builders, fabricators, and hot rod shops in the country.There is an honestly and feel to the photography in this book that is unique, in my experience, to the genre. Normally the photos are just too posed, too unnatural, and give the vibe that the guy shooting them was totally interrupting the work of the guys in the shop. This book’s pictures have a comfortable fly on the wall appeal that gives the reader the impression that they are an old friend, or at minimum a welcome guest.There are big name builders, like Roy Brizio, and Pete Eastwood, as well as guys like the late Pat Foster (who did amazing work restoring or recreating old drag cars) shown along with several builders whose names rang a bell, but aren’t household names like the other guys.Each chapter has an introduction about the person about to be featured. By the final chapter we found it more fun to use the photography as an initial guide, form an opinion on who we thought the builder was through there work, and then read the intro back to see how our perception met up. These guys all build world class cars. This is the ream team of car building, especially for high end type hot rods. If you love great photography and learning about the guys behind the cars you see winning all the major shows, you need this book as it provides a rare personal glance into the places that these fellows are most comfortable, their shops. The shops are a great testament to the balance between raw skill and machinery. These are not bling filled caverns. Instead they are to these guys what a nice little studio is to an artist, a place to make their magic and see their vision come to fruition."
Jalopnik.com, Review April 26, 2009
"For those of you who like to get your 90-weight-coated paws on some car-themed reading material, we're continuing with this book-review thing. Today we're checking out a weighty slab of a coffee-table book. Hot Rod Garages poses something of a dilemma for the intended audience, because it really ought to live in the garage, where you can thumb through it while digging deep for motivation to work on that rusty '61 DKW Munga Hell Project… but you'd feel a twinge of guilt the first time you dropped a torque converter on its snazzy three-dimensional cover (the windows in the cover's garage illustration are actual holes cut through the cover, an effect that doesn't show up so well in photographs but is pretty cool in person). The concept behind the book is quite simple: Vincent visited the garages and workshops of 18 builders of vehicles that fall within the hot rod and/or custom tradition and documented what he found. Some are big names and some aren't; all create some pretty serious machinery, and their shops range from primitive to palatial. I cracked open this book hoping to see hundreds of obsessive closeups of battered tools and weird engine parts on scarred workbenches, which wasn't what I found; most of the photographs show entire cars, many of which aren't parked in the garages in which they were created. That's not really a problem, however, because plenty of the non-garage photos were shot on the Bonneville salt flats and just about all the cars are serious gearhead pr0n.You get a generous helping of text for a coffee-table book, including interviews of car builders and the author's reminisces of his experiences with them. Best of all is the fascinating history of the Moal family's operations in East Oakland, written by Michael Dobrin, and the extensively documented buildup- practically a how-to guide- of the Rolling Bones' George Poteet '34 coupe.The verdict: a Three Rod Jalopnik book rating. An enjoyable book for the average car geek, a big improvement over the tedious stuff that sits on most coffee tables… and pure un-stepped-on crack for those hooked on the traditional hot rod aesthetic. Murilee says check it out!"
