I believe the basic problem is the contents weren't originally intended to become a book. Having worked at Peterbilt back in the 70's with similar documents, it's my belief the "Assembly Manual" is simply a compilation of individual assembly drawings. These were originally developed to establish best assembly practices or sequence instructions for each entry.
Don't know about GM, but at Peterbilt there was no "book". If you needed something on one of the pages you went to Document Control and had them run a copy. I suppose we should just be thankful the source documents were retained and assembled into a single volume instead of being discarded.
