Fay Leone Faurote, who also wrote a book called The How and the Why of the Automobile, declared, in his introduction to the book, A Boy's Text on Gas Engines, "Boys, when I was a small boy, I remember how much I was interested in everything mechanical. The engineer was my hero;...I remember well how I tried to read the dry, technical description of motors, steam engines and such things...it seemed as if the men who wrote them never realized that boys existed,-and that boys wanted to know about such things." Faurote's introduction continued: "Boys, then and there I decided that if I ever did understand some of these seeming mysteries of engineering, I would write a book that boys could understand." Pitched at interested and mechanically included youngsters, whom Faurote assumes will be male, the book proceeds to try to explain, step by step, the way a gasoline powered automobile engine works.