Gaston Grümmer The Art Of Carrosserie

PHILIPPE GRÜMMER & LAURENT FRIRY, Dalton Watson, £230, ISBN 978 185443 290 2

We were somewhat surprised when this mammoth twovolume work arrived at the office; we’ll admit to having previously been less than familiar with Gaston Grümmer’s cars, of which just nine are known to survive. Surely there couldn’t be all that much to write about?

After reading all 736 pages, we are no longer merely surprised by the existence of The Art of

Carrosserie, but astonished by it. That Gaston Grümmer lived long enough to establish one of the most successful Parisian coachbuilders of the 1920s was nothing short of a miracle.

In 1914, while Gaston was at cavalry school, he and his out-of-control horse were hit by a train. Unlike the horse, he recovered from his injuries just in time for World War One and went straight to the Front, where he was caught in an ambush and left for dead. He lay stock-still as a German soldier – dispatched to check the battlefield for prisoners – peered at him, and he did not make a sound as he felt a bayonet being shoved into his knee. One convoluted rescue, one poisoning and two plane crashes later, Gaston was finally demobbed, and he returned home to run the family coachbuilding business in the absence of his late father.

Volume One does a fine job of explaining how Gaston’s experiences during the Great War shaped him, and reveals the creative streak that eventually led him to strike out on his own as a maker of concours-conquering bespoke cars.

The copy is sometimes awkwardly broken up by (interesting) archive material and sometimes covers the same ground more than once, but these are minor quibbles. The Grümmer story is a good one, and this telling is rich with detail thanks to the involvement of Gaston’s youngest son, Philippe Grümmer, and noted historian Laurent Friry.

Our hero’s cars were not generally as showy as those by contemporaries such as Figoni et Falaschi although, if you wanted an interior made from the skins of 800 lizards, you could apparently have it. They were always innovative, however. The authors explore Gaston’s use of a low-slung bodywork design and his obsession, as a former French Air Force pilot, with aerodynamics.

It was this obsession that did for the company, Gaston’s polarising and pricy Aéroprofil designs finding few buyers during the Great Depression. Volume Two of The Art of Carrosserie is dedicated to them, and to the Grümmer-bodied cars that remain, among them four Bugattis. Should we ever encounter one of the survivors we’ll now recognise it as something special, or at least as something especially improbable. There are many merely rare cars about, but far fewer that by rights should never have existed in the first place.