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Mr. Micawber in Dickens' David Copperfield

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Posts tagged ‘Buick’

March 16th, 2011

In 1922, the Maxwell Motor Company began an advertising campaign touting “The Good Maxwell.” Does that mean that prior Maxwells were bad? Unfortunately, some of them were. It had not always been so. Jonathan Maxwell was a pal of Benjamin Briscoe, and Briscoe convinced J.P. Morgan to invest in their new car company. The jaunty….
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March 9th, 2011

In April 1979, General Motors introduced a new line of compact cars. Designated “X-bodies,” an early use of a corporate code name in automotive marketing (the predecessor X-body, the Chevrolet Nova and corporate siblings, had not used the X-word in public), the line included the Chevrolet Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega and Buick Skylark. The….
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January 12th, 2011

October 3, 1963, is a red letter day for many car enthusiasts, but few of them know about it. It can be considered the birth date of the Pontiac GTO, as far as the public is concerned, but because the GTO was a stealth project its actual “birth” came unheralded on new-car-introduction day, a check-box….
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January 20th, 2010

I’ve heard it said that in the upper reaches of collector car circles it’s considered coarse and crass to refer to a Rolls-Royce as a “Roller,” although “Rolls” is generally acceptable. The same goes for Hispano-Suiza: “Hispano,” certainly, but never “Hisso.” Why, then, does everyone refer to a Duesenberg as a “Duesie”? In fact, the….
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January 6th, 2010

Buicks for 1959 were all new. The baroque behemoths of 1958 were replaced by a clean, finned motif reminiscent of a supersonic airplane. The design had been presaged by the attractive 1957 concept XP-75, also known as Skylark II. The only holdover was the square-buttons in the grille. The brochure called them “Buicks so new….
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Serendipity: n. An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
“They were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
Horace Walpole, The Three Princes of Serendip
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