I’ve been having a bit of a clear out whilst reorganising my library and the time has come to dispose of a number of items which may be of interest through my lightpress account on e-bay.

First up is an eclectic collection of some 40 odd car advertisements from the French magazine Connaissance des arts from the late 60’s to early 70’s, which I’ll be posting over the coming weeks, below is a small selection of the ads I posted over the weekend.

François Hardy is probably best known amongst petrol heads as one of the stars of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Grand Prix in which she plays the role of Lisa girlfriend of the hot Italian rookie Nino Barlini played by Antonio Sabàto. As well as being an actress François is also a popular singer and model. Above she appears in an undated 1969 ad for Uniroyal tyres. The strap line translates as “Farnçoise Hardy has big feet”.

Regular readers will know that I have an abstract photography practice based on images of blurry light, one of many antecedents in this area of practice was the French commercial photographer who I only know as “Rodriguez” who took the photo of the 105 series Alfa Romeo Giulia appearing in this advertisement which is dated October 1969 on the reverse.

The worlds first production car powered by a rotary Wankel motor was the 1964 NSU Spider seen in the advertisement dated March 1967 above. In all just over 2,000 of these 50 hp machines were built between 1964 and 1967. Jay Leno is a current owner of one of them about which he made this linked short film.

Finally for this week there is this undated Chrysler ad which was published somewhere between 1965 and 1966. What is particularly interesting is that alongside a Valiant V200/Dart 270, a Plymouth Barracuda, Plymouth Fury III, Chrysler 300 Coupé and 145 hp Space Saver Parmi marine motor there appears a curiosity built in Thessalonika, Greece called the Farmobile.

The Farmobile holds the disitinction of being the only MOPAR vehicle to be powered by a BMW motorcycle engine, found in the back, which transmits drive to the rear wheels through a Porsche designed 4 speed gearbox. It is thought less than 1000 of these vehicles were built by Farco which was thought to have been acquired by Chrysler in order to gain access to the West German market.

For the rest of the month I’ll be posting further updates of my e-bay listings on Tuesdays to test the water.

Thanks for joining me on this “Françoise Hardy and French Car Advertisements” edition on “Gettin’ a li’l psycho on tyres”, I hope you will join me again tomorrow. Don’t forget to come back now !