De Tomaso Racing Blue Blood

IF THE MARQUE De Tomaso is mainly familiar to you through cars such as the Mangusta, the Pantera, maybe the Longchamps and, if you're next-level classic car geek, racers such as the P70, then the sheer variety to be found in this mammoth tome is going to come as something of a shock. There are literally dozens profiled here, and one or two will probably be news to even the most seasoned enthusiast.

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Anyone remember the De Tomaso T68, for example? A hotted-up Ford Anglia 105E that was restyled by Michelotti and built by OSI in Turin, it was a dull-looking three-box saloon that never got beyond the prototype stage. The photos show it wearing go-faster sill stripes and a bonnet scoop, under which was supposedly a 68bhp version (hence the name) of the 997cc Ford engine, fitted with De Tomaso's Formula 3 cylinder head.

It's just one of the many curios to be found here in this lavishly produced hardback that lives up to McKlein's reputation for publishing beautiful books. Every part of De Tomaso history is covered in its 458 pages, though, as the co-authors point out, the focus is very much on the cars rather than on Alejandro de Tomaso himself.

More examples: the 1980s and '90s are a particularly rich seam of De Tomaso styling proposals and special editions, and no fewer than nine different styling sketches for the 'pocket rocket' Daihatsu Charade-De Tomaso are shown, one above the other. De Tomaso's last venture was the Nuova Vallelunga of the early 2000s, a compact little sports coupé looking rather like a curvy, more Italianate version of a Ford RS200, but it was stillborn - as was a last-ditch attempt to save the company by assembling Russian UAZ Simbir 4x4s in Italy with Iveco engines. Alejandro de Tomaso died on 21 May 2003, and a year later so did his company.

You get words with the wonderful pictures, too, as proven by the spread, inset left. The authors spent years researching the text and it's full of fascinating nuggets (sample: at his high school in Argentina, one of Alejandro's classmates was the future revolutionary Che Guevara) but the way it's formatted, with no paragraph indents or spacing in between, makes it hard work to read. One page, in particular, is a solid wall of words that quickly bogs your brain in an impenetrable quagmire.