Book: Three-wheelers A-Z

British writer Chris Rees clearly is a fan of mobile obscurities. He has contributed a few times to these pages too, with some extraordinary findings. However, his greatest passion has to be the three-wheeler. He wrote a book about them in 1995, setting a standard. I believe he must be the only person who actually made a picture of the Mini based AC Donington during its presumed only appearance in 1982. More recent he could have cracked a mystery three-wheeler here, too (click). So if there ever was going to be one man who could do better, it had to be Rees himself. That has now happened. 'Three-wheelers A-Z - the definitive encyclopedia of three-wheeled vehicles from 1940 to date' continues where Rees' first book three-wheelin' book stopped. It describes no less than 1,122 vehicles on 240 pages and it's published under his own new label 'Quiller Print'.

It's a wonderful book with something new you won't have known before on every single page. Once you start browsing you will have difficulty to stop absorbing the trivia about all these vehicles, so many of them unknown. While his earlier book on the subject mainly focussed on British and European three-wheelers, this one includes vehicles from every part of the world. The only disadvantage to that - that I can think of - is that it also leads to many rather boring Asian rickshaws and tuk-tuks. Never mind. In his forward Rees mentions that only production vehicles are included, but you won't be surprised that the production of a large number of them is limited to '1', 'very few' or 'probably 1'. Apart from the AC Donington ('No built: probably 1'), there are 17 more Mini based creatures which made it to this encyclopedia. Rees clearly likes some of these, Stimson's insane Scorcher for example almost gets a full page with four photographs while plenty of others (read: less wacky ones) are limited to one or two lines only and a picture in stamp size. Buy this book before it sells out.

ABC Tricar to Zzipper Triton: Rees' new book contains 240 pages and 1,122 vehicles

Excluded are terrain vehicles, racing cars and one-offs, leaving 18 Mini based road going cars