By Jonathan Harley. To say that Jonathan Harley knows his subject inside out is
no exaggeration; in the past four decades he has restored over one hundred
Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts, frequently resurrecting them from little more than a
pile of scrap or a long-abandoned chassis. He knows every nut and bolt of these
magnificent vehicles, an intimate knowledge that was put to good use in
identifying, sometimes only by bolt design or the position of a hole in a
crossmember, exactly which chassis he was working on, settling disputes over
authenticity which had reverberated for years.
But in this fascinating and entertaining book, he also gives
us a wider picture of the car that was dubbed 'the best in the world'; how it
came about, why it looked as it did, how it compared to its contemporaries, and
how people viewed it, both a hundred years ago and today."The Silver
Ghost: A Supernatural Car" is a personal recollection of the
car restoration business from its infancy, working on the exciting 'barn finds'
of forgotten vehicles bought for scrap value, which would later command dizzy
sums at auction. Jonathan also introduces us to the numerous larger-than-life
personalities he met along the way, and the adventures they brought in their
wake -bizarre, exotic, frequently amusing, and occasionally life-threatening.
Many rarely-seen and unpublished pictures are included, spanning the century of
a car whose engineering brilliance made the experience of driving
truly 'supernatural'.
Jonathan Harley served in the Royal Armoured Corps in
Malaya and Germany, where he acquired practical experience working on
Rolls-Royce military engines. He followed a career in mechanical engineering
until the chance discovery of an abandoned 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I and its
subsequent restoration led him to found J. N. Harley Engineering, one of the
foremost restoration shops in the United Kingdom working almost exclusively on
the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
- Hard bound with dust jacket
- 224 pages
- 255mm x 255mm
- 220 black and white and color photographs