The pace is not lessening. I’m handed a book titled Sports Cars of the World. The flysheet is inscribed: ‘To Dean, best wishes, Neil Armstrong’. “He was my neighbour in Ohio,” says Butler.
Although he’s not an autograph collector by choice, there are some good ones in the library. Butler’s favourite car of the dozens that he’s owned and raced is a Bugatti T51 once raced by Louis Chiron, so unsurprisingly the Bugatti section is well populated. There’s a programme from the event that celebrated the centenary of Ettore Bugatti’s birth that is signed by, among other Bugatti luminaries, Louis Blériot (son of the aviation pioneer) and Elisabeth Junek. Junek was a Bugatti driver who is one of the greatest women drivers of all time and who beat Tazio Nuvolari in a straight fight. “Look at this,” says Butler, “a cook book of Czech recipes written by Junek. It’s the only cookery book in the library but I had to have it.”
There don’t seem to be many biographies, I point out. “In a different room,” says Butler. And sure enough, there is…
