BugattiBugatti EmblemsBy Tamas Jozsef Valko
This book, which will be presented at the Molsheim Festival in September, is the story of the creation of the Bugatti emblem. The story covers the beginning and goes up to the present appearance of the emblem. To this day, nobody has really looked into this subject, because it has not been realised that the emblems are a masterpiece in themselves, because they are all unique up to 1930. Even after that, there are still small differences. This book will give the emblems a different appreciation. Review by Jaap Horst 5-10-2025 A book on the Bugatti emblems, is that interesting enough for a book you would ask. And yes, it is. Is it interesting enough to fill a book of 500 pages and 200 euro? No, definitely not. The author comes to this number of pages by duplicating everything, and making everything as large as possible; All text is in three languages (with some errors in the English translation, I did not check the French), and in a very large format. There are only 11 to maximum 15 lines of text per page! Many images are printed more than once, many of the emblems featured several times throughout the text, again and again. All images are also printed full-page, even when the quality of the (digital) image is rather poor or very poor. Then there is the quality of the contents; the book lacks structure, there are no clear chapters, there's no index, not even page numbers. Most of the book consists of one image on the one page, and a description on the facing page. However, in some cases the description is about the image on the page before that (which you have to figure out by yourself). There is a lot of text (and repeating images) about the Type 10, which Bugatti designed and built while working for Deutz in Cologne. Several errors in the text, and did Ettore really design the emblem for Deutz also? A well-known image of a man sitting in a small Deutz is said to be Ettore, which he clearly is not. Anyhow, this type 10 story of about 50 pages has no place in this book, maybe for only a few pages, not more.
Then there is the main discovery, a whole series of designs for the Bugatti emblem, most of them in black. It is implied that these are designs for the later and well-known red emblem, but how comes the author to this conclusion? There is no statement about where these emblem designs came from, and thus the reader gets no idea about why they should be so important. There are many pages (I didn't count them, the pages are not numbered, remember) about enameling, as if Bugatti was the only or the first manufacturer of automobiles with enameled emblems. The same about the setting of an emblem on the radiator, with a copper plate bent around the edges, here many unnecessary pages about jewelry, where a similar technique was used. And then there are even more pages of the brewery "Bremme", Emil Bremme being a friend of Ettore, and Bremme coming to use a similar design for his marque as Bugatti. This may be of significance, but why show Mr. Bremme's Bugatti's so many times, with some photographs duplicated... Conclusion: It is a book with some interesting content, but it could have been so much better, without all of the repetitions, a better structure, no or much less info about aspects that do not matter and a text that would lead the reader towards a specific conclusion, which it does not now. At the end, the reader still does not have a good idea about how the emblem developed, just that there were about a hundred variants. And; 100 pages and 50 euro would have been enough. ps.: Oh yes, and the last page; it is glued to the backside of the book, almost as an afterthought. It is a thank you to those people who assisted Valko in one way or another, but why are all names repeated at least three times?? |