Hometown Buick Collection
The beginning of the Hometown Buick Collection dates back to 2006. In over ten years we have collected over 5,000 items of all kinds – but all related to 1950s Buick. We’ve got them all, from ultra rare internal Buick engineering manuals as well as common owners guides. The Hometown Buick is divided into sections. They are:
Literature. Here we have all kinds of paper-based stuff: Repair manuals like the shop manuals, books, flyers, postcards and an (almost) complete collection of the Buick Magazine. Hometown Buick also has parts books and press release kits for many model years.
Showroom Items. Once we created the idea to rebuild an original 1950s Buick dealership with all authentic showroom display items. That includes hard to find Trim Books & Showroom Albums plus banners and everything that we’ve spotted on pictures of 1950s Buick showrooms.
Photos. Buick not only published photos along with their press releases, they also ordered design studies with photographers before the production run. Hometown Buick is very lucky to have hundreds of original styling experiment photos, especially for the 1954 Buick. Owners and other photos of the decade complete this section.
Slides. This part of the Hometown Buick Collection consists mainly of two kinds: 35mm slides showing Buicks in the public and slides on slidefilms, which are part of slidefilm sets with a slidefilm and a matching record. We call it “Powerpoint 1950s style”.
Records. We have hundreds of records. About 80 percent belong to slidefilm sets of the Buick Dealer Organization Training program (DOT). But sometimes we listen to the other ones we have with radio commercials and Buick messages for dealerships and salesmen on it.
Car IDs. Sometimes, when a car gets crushed, the junk yard sells parts of the vehicle. We buy them for educational purposes. They help us to teach you how to decode them.
We have scanned every single item of our Hometown Buick Collection using professional equipment. Everything was preserved perfectly for the future. That along took thousands of hours! The amount of saved data is over 36 TB (over 36,000 GB). And its still growing – like the whole collection. We’re proud that our Hometown Buick Collection is one of the largest collections of 1950s Buick memorabilia worldwide.
No 1950s Buick owner can buy all that stuff. We think it’s our mission to provide you with literature and other items that increases your fun with your 1950s Buick. So we’ve started to present every item with the background info that it deserves. Of course that might take some time… we add items every couple of days. So it’s worth visiting this Hometown Buick every week!
If you have anything that needs to be saved for further generations, please let us know!
The major part of the Hometown Buick Collection is located near Edison, NJ. We’re always open for museums joining them as a temporary exhibition. Interested? Contact us!