COMMENT
Steve Cropley
MY WEEK IN CARS
Boswell (third from left) gave key insights at
Autocar archive launch
MONDAY
Truly momentous week. Today we unveiled the new, digitised, 125-year Autocar archive to a full house of loyal readers in the Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall, an organisation with early motoring connections every bit as distinguished as our own. Our event helped kick off the R AC’s annual London Motor Week, whose climax is always the Brighton Run for pre-1905 cars, the world’s oldest motoring event.
The indefatigable Pete Boswell, who led our archive project, talked about the sheer enormity of scanning 1.1 million pages – at two seconds a page – without damaging the original magazines. The joy for those of us who operate the mag today was being surrounded both by the people who created it (we were joined by no fewer than five former Autocar editors) and those for whom it has been done. It was another affirmation that this old mag isn’t just a venerable piece of media: it’s a thriving community.