Packard Motor Car Company, by Evan P. Ide, 2003, ISBN 0-7385-1208-7, Paperback, 128 pages, 207 black and white photos. Arcadia Publishing, 2A Cumberland Street, Charleston, SC 29401, (843) 853-2070, fax (843) 853-0044, toll-free in U.S. (888) 313-2665, Internet sales: arcadiapublishing.com. $19.99.

It's not a large book and it's emphatically not a history. It doesn't even extend beyond 1932, save for one lonesome 1938 landaulet photo. The text is minimal, being essentially 206 photo captions, some with historical asides, plus an Introduction and a Foreword by Joseph Freeman of the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. But what this book has is photos -- remarkable photos, most of them not previously available. And that's where the Larz Anderson Auto Museum comes in.

The late Rod Blood, whose name is still recognizable among auto historians nearly 40 years after his death, came across a stack of documents which had been salvaged from the Packard operations in Detroit in 1957 (there are several heroic stories of such salvage operations, including Dick Teague's, whose salvage work was recently and tragically destroyed in a fire). Blood attached such importance to his discovery that he traded a whole Packard for the filing cabinet and its contents. Blood left the entire collection -- plus cabinet -- to the Anderson museum in 1966. Evan Ide, the museum's curator, recently rediscovered the lot and this book is the result. "Most of them," Freeman points out, "were thought to have been lost forever."

For a historian looking over a historical book, let's admit it, the first thought is to keep an eye open for inaccuracies. This book may be unique in that department, for the photos were originally identified by such luminaries as James Ward Packard himself (plus other company representatives over the next 30 years), so inaccuracies are, shall we say, highly unlikely. This leaves the reader to discuss over dinner, if so inclined, things like a caption that says that "Packard's inability to compromise any quality eventually led to the company's demise," and whether it might have been more complicated than that.

These photos are uniformly striking and crisp, and many of them are downright art shots; Packard apparently employed only first-rate photographers and there's only one photo in the main text that we would categorize as slightly blurred. And when you see that the book includes photos of things like a gloved hand on a gearshift lever and a study of a steering wheel, you can be fairly sure that the museum is giving us the whole lot here. One of them even has penned markings on it, and many of them have the official identification notes still visible right on the image; the publisher has just left those on, and they add a lot.

There's a bonus too: a six-page chapter on racing Packards (in which there ARE a few soft-focus photos and one cracked print). So what has the museum made available here? A first-rank collection of photos -- two of which are double-truck -- for the Packard historian at a price of less than 10 cents each. We are talking about photos that would fetch, some of them, $5 to $10 each at a Hershey display, if you could find them. What's not to like?

• George Hamlin