Was unpacking some long-packed bookshelf material, and I found four
volumes of an annual called "World Cars" by the Automobile Club of
Italy.  If I remember correctly this was a very expensive book, but
after a while they'd go on deep discount at Classic Motorbooks (are they
still around?) and you could pick up a couple year old edition for maybe
$15-20 or so.  This piqued my curiosity, seeing as we're in a completely
different age now where you can just find out stuff by sitting down at a
keyboard, but a quick google found that aside from a couple books for
sale at Amazon (all but one of which I already had) not much info was to
be found.

I was just curious for how many years these were published, what the
story was behind this nearly mind-bogglingly OCD attempt to catalog
every single car model produced worldwide every year, etc.

The books themselves are fascinating; looking up one's favorite car is
likely to only tell you things that you already know, and you may find a
factual error here or there, but it's also fun to just pick a country
where you've never visited and look at all the weird, low-production
stuff that was available.

Anyone else know what I'm talking about, and know anything more about
the series?  I picked these up as a kid and remember spending hours
being fascinated by all the cars that appeared to be one step away from
kit cars built in England and other northern European countries...  also
discovered very interesting stuff like a European International Scout
based vehicle (now that that's popped into my head after all these
years, I'm going to have to look it up...  Monteverdi I think?)

I might just have to pop for the one edition I saw on Amazon that I
didn't have, just so I can have *five* of these things taking up space
on my shelf...

Sort of along the same lines, I see Tad Burness released another
spotter's guide a while back while I wasn't paying attention, covering
1981-1990.  Worth buying?  I have the "monstrous" one, so the completist
in me tells me I should buy it, but that was kind of the dark ages of
American cars...

nate