Faxon Auto Literature has been serving auto enthusiasts since 1974.
For decades now, we have offered the world’s largest selection of automobile manuals and literature. In fact, we believe that we may be America’s largest specialty used bookstore (we offer new books as well). Currently, we are bursting at the seams of our 14,000 square foot facility.
In the early 1970s,
when conventional wisdom held that no post-World War II car would ever be collectible, Ed Faxon bought the car that he had dreamed about since high school – a red and white 1957 Ford Retractable. He wanted to learn everything he could about the car, so he started collecting literature (and he still is, to the tune of more than 500 pieces for 1957 Ford alone). Pretty soon, the collection was taking up valuable space in the two bedroom apartment, and Ed’s wife was concerned that he was spending too much on books. So Ed took his daughter’s red Radio Flyer wagon to the swap meet, loaded it with extra manuals, and put a sign on the side that the books were for sale. He was hooked.
Ed made one of his first innovations
when he decided to take a book of paint chips and separate out the individual sheets, so that a customer could buy just the chips that applied to his or her car, without purchasing a book with hundreds of unneeded sheets. It sounds perfectly logical now, but it had never been done before. The idea was so popular that his early business cards featured paint chips. These days, paint chips comprise a small portion of our sales, but the same spirit of thinking outside the box to meet customers’ needs still permeates the business.
Faxon Auto Literature grew gradually from a hobby into a business.
Ed applied the same enthusiasm to amassing a broad selection of manuals for his customers that he had applied to collecting the books for his favorite car. He began taking more and more boxes of books to the swap meets – he acquired a station wagon, then a trailer, and then a larger trailer. Finally, in 1980, he bought a 1968 32-foot-long custom-bodied Gerstenslager bookmobile (known at first affectionately as ”The Green Monster“).
By the mid-1980s,
he had a couple of employees, and the bookmobile was starting to make a noticeable sinkhole in the driveway of his home. It was time to move, and Ed rented a commercial warehouse. The pride of this first warehouse was a bookshelf known as ”the quarter mile wall.“ The shop manuals and parts books that filled this 16 foot high double-deep shelf would have stretched a quarter mile high if they were stacked in a single pile. By now, the inventory was doubling in size every four years. The business books that Ed read suggested that such an inventory was a financial nightmare; but customers weren’t complaining. Car collectors passed business cards to each other and told their friends that if you were looking for a manual, Faxon’s was the place to find it.
With a mail order business already growing by personal referrals,
Ed decided to expand it by offering a nationwide toll-free 800 number, and by advertising in Hemmings Motor News. The inventory kept growing, along with the size of the warehouse & number of employees. These days, most of our business is done over the phone and on the internet, but we still go to swap meets. We don’t bring a little red wagon anymore, but you’ll still find us at Pomona with our Peterbilt semi, which we’ve customized to serve as the Bookmobile II.
Currently,
we figure that we have over a million items in our 14,000 square foot warehouse. But just having this huge selection isn’t enough. Even though we’ve been in business almost 30 years, we are still learning about our books every day. We aren’t perfect, but we do know more about auto manuals than anyone else; this expertise allows us to make sure that our customers get the best books for their particular vehicle. Learning the best books for the customer has made us the number one seller of auto manuals and literature. The complexity of the vast number of titles we have means that only a percentage of our books are currently available on the internet. We are always working on expanding our internet products, but, by all means, give us a call!
