Too late for Sinterklaas. In time for Christmas?

If you are busy with classics 24/24, you often see things that have 'potential' before they are generally 'discovered' and better known. For example, 25 years ago the first ex-Soviet sidecar combination came into the picture in the editorial office and a freelance photographer / V drove around 20+ years ago in a Citroen BX. She still does, although she is now working on BX number five. But that someone 1.700 guilders for one Citroen BX paid? That was talked about! Three hundred guilders came first!

Pioneering is fun!

In such an early fancier trajectory you are usually pleasantly uninhibited. However, gathering information was quite a challenge in pre-internet times. Fortunately, there was - now only open after the doorbell - 'Autoboek International' from Peters Uitgevers BV in Deventer. And in the bigger cities you could buy foreign car and motorcycle magazines. Within the circle of friends and acquaintances, they passed from hand to hand.

The power of the Internet

Then we got the Internet, the institute where van Rolf Veenendaal van de Leertent once concluded: “It's fantastic, and we're all going to die”. That was already the time when people came to him in the store to try on helmets and clothes. One fit. The other searched simultaneously for the cheapest provider.

But the Internet did put us on the trail of 'Zwischen Hammer und Schluessel' and only four years ago we found the book Thijs van der Zanden wrote about the Citroën BX.
And meanwhile, the Russian sidecar combinations and the Citroën BXen achieved mild cult status. Thijs is now responding to that.

A standard work

In 2016 Thijs van der Zanden wrote his book about the Citroën BX - in Dutch. That was sold out after a year, but the question remained, even from abroad where it was difficult to read the Dutch book because real books and Google Translate simply do not work together so easily and where an English translation was asked for.

That is coming now, but not literally a 1 to 1 translation, because between 2016 and now quite a few things have surfaced that Thijs wanted to add to the new edition or that he could now update in terms of visual material and content. Also because at the moment at least two people are already working with these 'hydrauliques' out of passion and partial livelihood. And if, like Pascal, you have been bitten by the BX bacillus for a quarter of a century, you have a lot of first-line experience and knowledge.

The revised BX book will be released in early 2021, but can already be ordered now. There is a regular version that can be bought for 44,95 and a collectors edition for € 59,95. The latter is more luxurious, comes in a storage case and is signed and numbered in an edition of 100 pieces.

Both of the books we now mention are the result of a lot of first-line source research and personal experience. This makes them far above the average digital information that is often gathered in these fast times through online research, cutting and pasting. And that is understandable, because there are few sources such as Auto Motor Klassiek has in the form of a huge cellar full of cupboards full of cupboards with printed information from the earliest automotive times. We are therefore big fans of 'paper'.

In the run-up we reported that we were sometimes quite early in the 'discovery' of classics about which no bookcases have been written yet. But we're probably not the only ones with that kind of anticipation. We would therefore like to hear what, according to the readers of this site, the classics with a future, still dormant in the twilight of history, are. 'Just call!"