John Jacobus, the most knowledgeable authority on the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild presents the craftsmen, Guild enthusiasts and everyone interested auto design and model making with a follow-up to his outstanding 2004 book, The Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild: An Illustrated History. As thorough as his first work was, it unleashed a tide of enthusiasm from the original contestants who wanted their stories told and their cars shown.

From 1930 to 1968, General Motors sponsored a 1:12 scale model automobile design competition for the youth -- the famous Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. Each year, thousands of boys and young men from across America competed for scholarships by designing, building and submitting a scale model of their own "dream car," to be judged on such qualities as design originality and craftsmanship. A public relations bonanza for GM, the program helped to identify and nurture a generation of future leaders in design engineering, automotive design, automotive styling, industrial design and other endeavors.

Jacobus collaborated with 29 Guildsmen with entries from 1947 to 1968 to unearth the building tricks, techniques, methods and strategies employed by the national scholarship award winners and other contestants from the Guild's model car competition. These anecdotal stories reveal their model building experiences, trials and tribulations, successes and failures, as they moved up the learning curve to compete for and earn a GM university trust fund. Of the essayists, 70 percent were national winners who remembered their experiences in detail and related them enthusiastically. It is interesting that their youthful background (ages 12-20 years) varied dramatically in socio-economic circumstances and with a broad geographic representation. Many of the Guildsmen, regardless of their success in the Guild wanted to become auto designers at one of the Big 3 and were inspired early on to pursue careers in auto styling and design in Detroit.