Frequently Asked Questions
WHAT TYPE OF MAGAZINES ARE INCLUDED ON THE WEBSITE?
| SCOPE | INCLUDED | EXCLUDED |
|---|---|---|
| Publishing Frequency | Monthly, every other month, quarterly, annual | Weekly, every other week, club newsletters |
| Country | United States | All others |
| Target Readers | Consumers, hobbyists, racers | Service, parts & manufacturing organizations, repair shops, etc. |
| One-shots, limited series and annuals | Performance-oriented, some new cars and some technical "how-to" | Everything else |
| Make & model specific | Performance oriented Chevrolet, Ford, Pontiac and Mopar | All other marques |
| Other considerations | Rare & obscure; significant print volume; vintage motorsports | Newspaper or newsprint formats; current motorsports |
DO YOU OWN ALL THE MAGAZINES SHOWN ON THE WEBSITE?
Gosh, no!! My wife would kill me and then bury me under all of them!! We own older hot rod and muscle car titles, and
the rest come from the internet and readers who submit images.
DO YOU BUY AND SELL MAGAZINES?
We occasionally buy complete collections to add to our library, and we help our readers who want to buy a specific issue
that we happen to have. But this is infrequent and informal.
The site is intended to be non-commercial and free of advertising.
HOW IS WEBSITE CONTENT ORGANIZED?
- Selected images and magazine history are published to the website when images from the start of publication to a desired end date are at least 90% complete. There are exceptions that cause a less complete collection to be published. It is generally when the title is rare and we use it to collect images from readers.
- Not all titles on the site contain all images ever printed. This is a practical matter since each title has to be researched and every image collected, edited and published.
- Cover images and table of content pages are added in phases. We start with older dates and work forward in time to more recent ones. We are almost done bringing published cover images up to at least 2020.
- All titles are placed into one of 21 genres or categories. Most car magazine content rarely fits neatly into one, i.e., there are numerous titles that cover both hot rods and muscle cars. Typically titles cover two or three major categories. Therefore, content is grouped in this manner for reader benefit, but recognize these are not always clean distinctions.
- For many titles, we have included Table Of Content pages. We capture them when they are available but concentrate on publishing in the hot rod, and muscle car sections.
WHY IS THE WEBSITE CALLED 99WSPEEDSHOP?
I grew up in smaller cities in Oregon. These homes were on Oregon Highway 99W. As both a teenager and adult,
I loved cars and mechanical devices. I learned
the pleasure of driving this two lane highway in cars of
my youth -- Chevy Novas, Impalas and Chevelles, and Pontiac GTOs and Trans Ams. Youth, friends, cars and freedom on Oregon's
equivalent of
the "Mother Road".
BUILDING THIS WEBSITE SEEMS LIKE A BIG JOB!! WHEN WILL YOU BE DONE?
This was a big, ambitious undertaking when I started 10 years ago. But the effort has considerably slowed down more recently.
My friend Robert E. Lee has been cataloguing car magazines and books for almost seven decades -- see his lists HERE. His list of U.S. titles over the last century is over 7,100.
I have listed almost 500 titles (including annuals and one-shots), and my collection process is starting to slow due to lack of access to rare titles and hard-to-find images. If my forecasting is accurate, I'll eventually top out at around 50,000 to 55,000 images and 600 titles.
So my efforts are to document car magazine history and preserve as much information as possible before it winds up in the dustbin of history. This website is my small gift to those of us on this planet who love old car magazines in printed form!