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What: “Man Against the Salt,” by Harvey Shapiro, Minerva Press.

Where: $14.95, from Communications Plus USA, 2103 No. Decatur Road, Suite 335, Decatur, GA 30033. No bookstore sales.

Timing can sometimes be everything in selling a book. When Harvey Shapiro began to put together a biography of his old friend, Art Arfons, and his efforts--some successful and some not--to set a world land-speed record, interest in the record was waning. But Shapiro, who met Arfons while an award-winning sportswriter in Dayton, Ohio, kept plugging along.

As he neared completion with one of the most detailed books of the Arfons-Craig Breedlove rivalry on the Bonneville Salt Flats, along came England’s Richard Noble and Andy Green to break the sound barrier with Thurst SSC. Interest soared as TV highlights showed the monstrous beast racing across the Black Rock Desert at supersonic speeds.

The book, 464 pages of LSR history and anecdotes, is a bargain at $14.95.

“It’s a strange thing about Bonneville, something I’ll never understand,” Arfons wrote in the foreword. “When I’m there, I can’t wait to get the hell out and go home. But as soon as I get home, I can’t wait to get back.”

The fears are there too. “When I leave home, I wonder whether I’ll be back. It’s always on my mind . . . when the hell do they send the body back?”

There is more than Arfons, though that would easily be enough. There are also sketches of Breedlove, Noble, Gary Gabelich, John Cobb, Arfons’ brother Walt and even the Budweiser Rocket rider, Stan Barrett. The anecdotes are fascinating, such as:

When the Shah of Iran wanted the record set on his soil, he invited Mickey Thompson to look over a site for him and Arfons to run. “They’ve got the flats but the country is so screwed up,” Thompson said in rejecting the offer.

“The battle between me and Craig in 1964-65 was great,” Arfons told Shapiro. The record changed hands eight times.

Now Breedlove’s attempt to better Green may be the germ of another Shapiro book.