About Otto Booklets
Otto Booklets is a free weekly newsletter for people who care about how cars look, feel, and present themselves. Every Thursday, it pairs three original manufacturer brochures with the design and history that make the cars worth another look.
3booklets each week
32,000+brochures in the archive
60+years of car history
Each issue brings together one classic, one foreign-market car from the 1980s or 1990s, and one modern car. The writing looks beyond the specifications to the engineering decisions, design details, and history that shaped each one.
Every feature links to the complete brochure hosted by Dezo’s Garage. The site also has a random booklet pull for the perfectly reasonable pastime of opening a 1971 Riviera brochure when you meant to answer email.
The idea
Cars have always interested me more for their look and feel than for the performance figures under the hood. I’m fascinated by the visual choices made for a vehicle, what those choices say about the car, and how a manufacturer’s design language moves across an entire model-year lineup.
Then I discovered the brochures. Manufacturers have used them for more than sixty years not only to show a car at its best, but to tell a visual story: who the car was for, where it might take them, and—most revealingly—who the buyer dreamed of becoming by owning it.
A brochure is advertising, design artifact, and automotive history in the same handful of pages. I started Otto Booklets because I thought other people might enjoy reading them that way too.
Founder
Ryan Fritsch
Ryan is a car design enthusiast and the owner of a 1990 BMW E30. He founded Otto Booklets in San Francisco in 2026 to give old brochures a thoughtful reading—and to spend more time with the visual details that conventional car coverage tends to hurry past.
Yes. The weekly newsletter, past issues, and random booklet pull are free to read.
A new issue goes out every Thursday, with three cars drawn from three different eras.
The scans are hosted by Dezo’s Garage. Otto Booklets credits and links to Dezo’s Garage wherever its scans appear.
No. Each feature uses a small excerpt for commentary and links to the complete scan at Dezo’s Garage. The brochures remain copyrighted by their manufacturers.
Certainly. Start with the past issues, or let the random booklet pull choose for you.
The next issue
One classic, one foreign, and one modern car—with the stories behind them.