FUORISERIE LANCIAS - ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF A CULTURE 1925 - 1985

Buying a chassis from a car manufacturer and asking a coachbuilder to construct a body after an individual design was normal practise during the early years of motoring. For Lancia too, although the arrival of his revolutionary Lambda with body and chassis built as an integrated unit restricted freedom to create something different or exclusive.

So in 1925 even Lancia started the production of Lambdas with the original concept modified into a flat-platform chassis, yet still of unitary construction. That was the start of production of a range of no less than 26,000 bodyless chassis for the next 30 years, to be clothed by individual coachbuilders with exclusive one-off bodywork or produced in very limited numbers - hence the italian expression fuoriserie - or custom-built.  

Located for a large part in and around Turin, where Fiat focused on mass-production, exclusive coachbuilding for Lancia evolved as a unique culture of high levels of creativity and craftsmanship, so much appreciated then by individual customers as well as today's connoisseurs and collectors. A culture also much enhanced by the glamour of popular local concours d'elegance. 

All this was the fruit of visionary entrepreneurs like Battista 'pinin' Farina and his elder brother Giovanni, Giacinto Ghia, Ercole Castagna, Giovanni Bertone, Vittorino Viotti, Alfredo Vignale, Felice Bianchi Anderloni from Carrozzeria Touring, and several others.

They developed coachbuilding in close cooperation with some of the most talented bodywork stylists of the thirties and early postwar years - count Mario Revelli di Beaumont, Giovanni Michelotti and Carlo Felice Boano. Their legacy is huge with several thousand items built, in addition to 49,525 exclusive special-bodied Lancias which were built by external coachbuilders between 1955 and the early seventies.

In this valuable publication, Wim Oude Weernink - who has dedicated much of his 55 year's career to all aspects of Lancia history - has decided to select as many examples of the Lancia coachbuilt culture as possible, in the end resulting in the 650 image-count.

Content:

1. The origin - Italy's coachbuilding industry 2. Lambda - added elegance 3. Dilambda - shaping Italy's design 4. Artena - versatility with elegance 5.1 Astura - Mario Revelli's decade 5.2 Tipo 'Bocca' - period flamboyance 6. Augusta - affordable luxury and variation 7.1 Pre-war Aprilia - opportunities for coachbuilders 7.2 Competition Aprilias - aluminium and aerodynamics 7.3 Ardea - compact functionality 8. Post-war Aprilia - innovation-driven revival 9.1 Aurelia - enhanced aesthetic refinement 9.2 PF200 - controversial avantgarde 10. Appia, Flaminia, Flavia & Fulvia - new industrial strategies 11. Lancia abroad - cross-border coachbuilding 12. The Fiat era - changing culture