Trans-Africa Land Rover

MARTIN PORT, Porter Press International, £30, ISBN 978 913089 29 0

Freelance publishing designer Martin Port has scored something of an own goal this month: if he hadn’t made such a fine job of our Book of the Month, reviewed opposite, then he might easily have scored the top slot with this volume, which is very much a personal project.

In 1959, photographer and film-maker Philip Kohler bought a brand-new Series II Land Rover for an expedition across Africa, recording the dates and places visited in signwriting on the vehicle’s hardtop. In 1962 he brought it back to England, and for much of the last 20 years of its life it was parked in the front garden of his house in Shepherd’s Bush, London, where it became a well-known local landmark.

Kohler died in 2015 and the Land Rover’s future was uncertain; it looked a wreck and was half-covered with ivy. Martin Port was keen that its obvious originality and history should be preserved, and offered to help Kohler’s family find it the right home, never expecting that he might have the chance to own it himself. But the family recognised that he would be the perfect new custodian – and this book more than justifies their faith.

Kohler left behind an incredible collection of colour slides and paperwork documenting his African trip, and the bulk of this 146-page hardback is devoted to presenting them in glorious fashion. Port is no mean writer, either, charting Kohler’s travels – and his later life in the movies, where he worked on several Bond films and Hollywood blockbusters – with an easy, unforced style that’s the perfect complement.

But it’s the final chapter – in which Port describes how he revived and preserved the Series II – that’s particularly fascinating (incredibly, its rear tub was still packed with spares and mementoes of that African expedition). Best of all, he uses it regularly. Philip Kohler would absolutely approve.