Tractors Of Europe - The Illustrated Guide

Tractors of Europe – The Illustrated Guide (2005) by Andrew Morland and Peter Henshaw
Haynes
ISBN: 184425206X
Condition: Very Good

There are coffee-table books about art, architecture, exotic travel and impossibly expensive sports cars. And then there are books about tractors. Sensible, heavy, mud-spattered tractors that have spent much of their working lives dragging things through fields while making absolutely no attempt whatsoever to look glamorous.

Tractors of Europe – The Illustrated Guide is a gloriously thorough celebration of the machines that have spent generations doing the real work of the countryside. Written by Andrew Morland and Peter Henshaw, it travels across Europe examining a huge range of manufacturers, models and designs, from familiar agricultural stalwarts to obscure continental contraptions that look as though they were designed by someone who had very strong opinions about gearboxes.

The photographs are the real joy here. Tractor after tractor appears in splendid detail, polished just enough for the camera while still retaining the unmistakable air of machinery that would much rather be towing a plough. Red ones. Green ones. Blue ones. Yellow ones. Enormous ones. Tiny ones. Tractors with elegant curves, tractors made almost entirely from rectangles, and tractors whose designers apparently believed visibility was an optional luxury.

Along the way, the book covers the history and development of European tractor manufacturing, showing how agricultural machinery evolved from relatively simple workhorses into increasingly sophisticated machines packed with engineering, hydraulics and enough controls to make a small aircraft feel under-equipped.

It is also a reminder of just how many tractor manufacturers Europe has produced. Massey Ferguson, Ford, Fiat, Deutz, Renault, Lamborghini and countless others all appear, demonstrating that virtually every country capable of manufacturing machinery eventually decided that what civilisation really needed was another method of pulling something heavy across a muddy field.

And yes, Lamborghini really did make tractors. Long before the name became shorthand for arriving noisily outside a casino, Lamborghini was producing agricultural machinery. Which means there is technically a perfectly respectable historical justification for parking a Lamborghini in a barn.

Morland and Henshaw treat the subject seriously without making it painfully technical. There is plenty here for enthusiasts who know exactly what a three-point linkage is, but the photographs and histories also make it enjoyable for those whose agricultural expertise extends no further than recognising that the large thing with enormous rear tyres is probably the tractor.

It is particularly good for browsing. Open it anywhere and you are likely to find some magnificently purposeful machine accompanied by details of its manufacturer, history and specifications. Before long you may discover yourself developing surprisingly strong opinions about bonnet design, wheel arrangements and whether tractors were better before manufacturers started giving them cabins resembling small offices.

Published by Haynes in 2005, Tractors of Europe has exactly the reassuring quality you would expect from a Haynes-related book: lots of machinery, plenty of detail and the quiet assumption that knowing more about mechanical things is inherently worthwhile.

An excellent book for tractor enthusiasts, agricultural history fans, machinery obsessives, engineering types, farmers, former farmers, people who grew up around farms, and anyone who has ever stopped beside a field and thought, “That is a particularly nice tractor.”

This copy is in Very Good condition, meaning it has survived considerably better than most tractors of comparable age, and has presumably spent far less time standing outside in February rain.

Available from Crappy Old Books, where occasionally even the books have more horsepower than the delivery van.

Keep browsing: See more Transport books Other books by Andrew Morland and Peter Henshaw