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Steve Jobs's pair of personally-owned Volkswagen manuals, long stored in the famous 'Apple Garage'—the attached garage at his family's home in Los Altos—inside a box bearing his name. Much of Steve Jobs's creative drive might be attributed to the influence of his father, Paul R. Jobs, a machinist and handyman that restored and flipped used cars on the side. Steve would famously sell his Volkswagen Transporter—better known as the Volkswagen 'Bus'—at the age of 21 to raise the working capital to found Apple Computer; his co-founder, Steve Wozniak, sold his beloved HP 65 calculator, and together they raised about $1,300 in capital to start their firm.
Includes:
- a softcover third printing of Clymer Publications' "Volkswagen Service–Repair Handbook, Transporter (1961–1972)," 7 x 10, 247 pages, published in December 1972, annotated on the last page in Steve Jobs's hand in blue ink with information on his vehicle: "Engine #H0014808, Chassis #246 011 985." A couple of headings inside are highlighted in blue, referring to "Tire Rotation" and "Spark Polarity." Also annotated inside the front cover, "S. Jobs," penned in an indeterminate hand.
- a spiral-bound softcover fourteenth printing of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot" by John Muir and Tosh Gregg, 8.5 x 11, 327 pages, published in March 1975, annotated on the last page in Steve Jobs's hand in blue ink with the same information: "Engine #H0014808, Chassis #246 011 985." Among the highlighted sections are colorfully-worded passages about warming up the engine, shifting speeds, tune-up procedures, and tire rotations, along with a suggestion for a source of hard-to-find parts located in Sacramento; interestingly, the book also recommends that the chassis and engine numbers be recorded in a safe place—a suggestion that Jobs clearly followed, noting them down in both repair manuals.
In overall very good to fine condition, with some edgewear and scuffing to covers.
Steve Jobs grew up immersed in the hippie culture and hacker-tinkerer ethos of 1970s Silicon Valley, and the Volkswagen Bus was symbolic of both—this is no less evident than in "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive," a legendary, countercultural repair guide that blends practical mechanical instruction with warmth, humor, and a deeply human approach to car care (for example, when it comes to tire rotation, the book suggests: "Don't rotate your tires! It takes about 500 miles for a tire to get used to its position on a car, and changing it around just messes up its head").
Beyond their practical use, these humble manuals stand as artifacts of Jobs’s formative years—a period defined by hands-on experimentation and a belief in the union of intuition and engineering. Well before Apple became synonymous with sleek, closed-system design, Jobs was literally elbow-deep in the workings of his Volkswagen, absorbing the lessons of simplicity, clarity, and user-centered thinking that would later shape his design philosophy. Long preserved in the storied 'Apple Garage,' these well-used guides bridge the countercultural DIY ethos of the 1970s with the revolutionary technological vision that would soon follow.
Provenance: from the personal collection of John Chovanec, stepbrother of Steve Jobs.
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