“Nobody knows how the binder journeyed from Detroit to upstate New York. When Josh Quick found it in a barn at an estate sale, he grabbed it without thinking. It was only days later, while flipping through the pages, that Quick realized he was holding a missing piece of General Motors history,” Bob Sorokanich, senior editor, GM News posted last week.*

In 2024, Josh Quick went to a farm estate sale in the small town of Conesus, about 45 minutes south of Rochester, New York, on the hunt for antique tractor parts. He thought he’d hit the jackpot. “I asked the guy, what do you want for all this stuff? He said, ‘two cases of Busch Light beer,’” Quick told GM News.

Among the pile of parts, Quick found a binder full of old pencil-on-paper car drawings.

“I flipped it open, saw the first picture, and thought, that’s cool,” he said. The guy running the estate sale had never seen the binder before. He told Quick to take it. “I just threw it in with the rest of the stuff,” Quick said. “I didn’t know what it was. I left it on the seat of my truck for three or four days. I was more excited about the tractor stuff.”

Quick eventually looked through the collection of hand-drawn automobiles, nearly 80 pages preserved in plastic sleeves. The images, all dated from the summer of 1940, show visions of what General Motors vehicles – Buicks, specifically – might look like in 1942.