Motorbooks History

It’s only fitting that our story begins in a garage.

The year was 1965, and North America was in dire need of quality car, motorcycle, and racing books. Luckily for gearheads, a transplanted Englishman and lifelong car guy named Thomas Warth took it upon himself to feed the need. From the stalls of his humble Minneapolis, Minnesota, garage, Warth launched a modest automotive book mail-order business selling transportation tomes, many of them imported from England. Thus was born Classic Motorbooks.

In 1973, Classic Motorbooks began publishing its own books, which it made available alongside those from leading transportation publishers around the world. This move put Motorbooks in the driver’s seat, allowing it to define the best books for enthusiasts and then engage the motoring world’s best photographers and writers to create them—an approach that continues to this day.

Besides our award-winning writers and shooters, we also partner with some of the biggest names in the business, like Harley-Davidson, Chevrolet, Ford, Hot Rod and Cycle World magazines, Dodge, and SRT—all to give us access to the best stories and the coolest photography. Alongside its own titles, Motorbooks continues to offer the best books from the other premier transportation publishers, fine-tuned exclusively for the enthusiast by gearheads who are just as obsessed as you are.

Motorbooks has embraced the gearhead life. If it has wheels, we dig it. Wrench, Race, Ride, Roll, Read: that’s our mantra. Now go burn some rubber.


Sites We DigIt’s hard for a company to publish books for almost 50 years without making a few friends. Whether these links lead to people we’ve worked with, people we’d like to work with, or simply blogs our staff members love to read, we recommend you check out the list below for some of our favorite sites.