| Ah yes, but most car books (especially the glossy big pictures ones) are made in the UK, and many are shot full of errors and many of those errors are repeated over and over, because the publishers just copy from one another without going to real sources. There is little to be trusted there, whether spec, production numbers, or even matching of pictures to captions (wrong year or model is common). The reason, I think, that the caddy gets the nod as fin icon is because there are more of them (then and now) and even more so, because the popularization of the fins in retro was all based on exploitation of the garish extremes of bad taste and slathered-on chrome that they represented. In that regard, the Caddy is surely the winner - it's a pastiche of inconsistent and garish adolescent fantasy elements bolted onto an obsolete platform. By comparison, the 61 Imperial (like most Exner work) is all of a piece, an integrated and sophisticated form, with bright work where it accents the basic shape - still a lot by modern standards, but understated then - hardly the thing to exemplify overdone ugly. Off the soapbox now, jc On Jan 15, 2008, at 9:49 AM, Wilfred Powell wrote: I have never actually measured the fins but being a finned car fanatic I have tons of books on cars of this era and ALL of them state the 1959 Cadillacs tailfins achieved the highest height of this period, and I guess this is why these cars are like the poster-car of this style phenomenon. John Corey CFIC-Qdrive, 302 Tenth St., Troy, NY 12180 USA 518-272-3565 x201 fax: -272-3582 |
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