Right: Books published by Racemaker Press, of Boston, for sale at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Mass., during Tutto Italiano day.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

A few years ago, Joseph Freeman saw an opportunity to put his love of vintage race cars to work by starting a small, dedicated publishing house.

That was almost three years ago, and his Boston-based Racemaker Press now has eight books out with two more in development. The imprint focuses on automobiles, especially the early history of racing, which is Freeman’s special passion.

“It came about (in 2004) while I was editing a book on curling,” he said. “I said to the design assistant, ‘Gee, we could publish books on our own.’ ”

He said he saw “a niche for scholarly works which had a small but guaranteed market outside of the big publishers.”

For example, one of Racemaker’s first books was Walter L. Marr: Buick’s Amazing Engineer, by Bev and Jim Cox. Freeman said the book had been “on the shelf waiting to be published.”

Similarly, Racemaker’s most recent publication, Prestige, Status and Works of Art: Selling the Luxury Car 1888-1942, a comprehensive and colorful catalogue of advertising literature and brochures compiled by the late Thomas Solley, fits into the small scholarly market niche that Freeman said he is carving out for his company.

Other titles include King of the Boards by Gary Doyle, which is a profile of racer Jimmy Murphy who won the French Grand Prix in 1916 and the Indy 400 in 1922.

The title refers to the wooden boards used on many early tracks as they moved from dirt to a more substantial surface. Freeman said early cement and tarmac tracks proved too abrasive on tires, and so many were banked and laid with wooden boards like modern indoor tracks for bicycle races.

“Labor was cheap, wood was cheap,” he said. Other tracks, like the Indy 500, used bricks.

Author Doyle has also penned biographies of Ralph DePalma, an Italian American who won the Indy 500 in 1915, and Carlo Demand, a German artist who painted pictures of race cars in action.

Freeman said he is currently busy on the final edit — he calls himself chief editor — of a book about the Wilke family of Wisconsin that has been involved in racing since the early 20th century.

The family started racing in the 1920s and 1930s, gaining some success with Midget racing, which was all the rage following World War II.

Subsequently, Bob Wilke led a racing team named after the family business, Leader Card, that won the Indy 500 in 1959, 1962 and 1968 and the USAC National Championship car owner’s title six times between 1959 and 1968.

Bob’s son Ralph carried on for years after Bob’s death in 1970 with limited success. Freeman noted a turning point in auto racing came in 1963 when the money needed to field a racing team grew to the point it attracted professional money and organizations.

“It was a sea change,” he said, noting the arrival of international stars like Britain’s Jim Clark and Lotus in 1963. “Single owners who had supported (a team) out of their own pockets could no longer afford it.”

However, he said Ralph’s sons have had success on the Midget circuit, both in Wisconsin and nationally.

Freeman also says he is getting ready to publish a book, Second to One, about all the great drivers who finished second but never won the Indy 500.

“It’s fun but a lot of work struggling against a deadline,” he said of his small publishing company. He has two associates, administrative and marketing associate Maria Writesel and design and production associate Sarah Morgan.

Morgan is married to Chinese national Xianxin Wu and regularly travels to Beijing to facilitate the design and printing of the books, which are priced from $20 to $100.

Freeman grew up in Hartford, Conn., and Nantucket, where his family has a boatyard. He served in the Peace Corps after graduating college, teaching English on the island of Ngatik (Micronesia) in the Pacific for three years.

After his return to the U.S., he worked in anti-poverty programs before joining the Massachusetts Department of Health. However, in the late 1980s he started writing about cars for various magazines, including Automobile Quarterly, continuing to be involved as a passive investor in the family boatyard in Nantucket.

Long associated with the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Mass., he served as executive director from 2000 to 2006 and is still on the board. He has also served as a judge of Open Wheel Race Cars at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in Monterey, Calif., for the last 10 years.

Freeman has a collection five classic racing cars, including a rare 1914 Type 35J Mercer Raceabout, which he said will still do 100 mph, and a 1924 Bugatti Type 30. He said he regularly races in vintage races in California and at Lime Rock Park, in Lakeville, Conn.

He said he also has five classic road cars, including a 1920 Roamer, which was “a copy of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost without the quality,” a 1969 Lotus Élan he has owned since new and a Messerschmitt, one of the smallest cars ever made.

Freeman also said he has been working for a number of years with two other writers on a comprehensive history of the Duesenberg racing years, Duesenberg: A Racing Legacy. A Duesenberg won the Indy 500 in 1924, 1925 and 1927. Freeman’s 1915 Duesenberg Board Track racer came second in the 1916 Indy 500.

He said that while the team has spent time tracking down every Duesenberg ever built – they were hand made in limited numbers – he is eager for the project to go to press.

Freeman said he was particularly interested in the early years of racing when American racing engineers, like the Duesenberg brothers, took ideas from European designers and adapted them.

“We knew how to design trains, they knew how to design watches,” he said. “American engineers took those ideas and designed (between 1914 and 1929) some of the finest race cars ever built.”

For more information, go to: www.racemaker.com/

pelsworth@projo.com