The biggest book we’ve seen in a long while was Perth motor historian Graeme Cocks’s Red Dust Racers, a huge work that took 20 years of research.
All about about racing at Lake Perkolilli, near Kalgoorlie, in the early years, it tipped the scales at 3.6kg — and made world news when UK writer Doug Nye dropped his copy on his foot.
However, it’s soon to be overtaken by a book on Bentley.
The famed Brit celebrates its 100th anniversary next year and to mark that milestone, it will release a limited edition book covering its illustrious century of operations and its future.
Called Bentley Centenary Opus, it will be much more than just a record of the brand’s history.
It will be published by Opus, and its writers have been given exclusive access to Bentley’s designers, engineers and executives — to present data never seen before.
Apart from a look at the luxury brand’s plans for the future, it will detail Bentley’s glorious 1920s Le Mans victories and iconic models of the 20th century, and highlight the people who helped bring the company and its cars to life.
Here’s the rub, as they tend to say in the upper echelons of Bentleydom: the book weighs nearly 10 times more than Cocks’s magnificent effort (which, incidentally, made it to the finals of the world motor book of the year).
Bentley Centenary Opus has a coffee table-collapsing mass of 30kg, its pages will be up to 50cm square and it will also have some Playboy-style fold-out sections (‘gateway’ pages in Opus-speak) stretching to two metres, so as to ‘offer full justice to the stunning imagery.’
The price has not yet been revealed, but it will probably be as substantial as the book, which will be printed in three editions: the Mulliner and Centenary editions in large print and the Crewe edition will be produced in a more compact size.
The books will arrive in 2019 and those wanting to reserve a copy need to contact Opus Publishing.
Bentley will also build a special Mulsanne (car, not book) as a homage to company founder Walter Owen (W.O.) Bentley.
Opus co-founder Hari Ramchandran: “We are thrilled and deeply honoured to be able to tell this unique story.”