Pezcyclingnews: Pez Bookshelf: €shoulder To Shoulder: Bicycle Racing In The Age Of Anquetil”

Book Review: Who has not gone through the belongings of their grandparents or parents and not found somewhere a big old shoebox full of dog-eared photos? Turned sepia with age (or by intent), they portray mysterious peoplewhy didnt anyone ever label these things?and events of the past, often in locales that may not even exist today. What a delight it was to plough through them, imaging a world that was truly a foreign country, a place where people dressed differently, acted differently and even looked unlike us. Now, just imagine a shoebox like that filled with 350,000 photos all devoted to bike racing and you have the stuff that dreams are made of for cycling fans. Welcome to the world of Shoulder to Shoulder, the latest deep dive into the Horton Collection archive.The remarkable collection of Shelly and Brett Horton is not unknown to Pez readers, of course. We reviewed their first book, a coffee table production that included not only archive photos but also pictures of holy relics (bicycles! Hugo Koblets jersey!) entitled Cyclings Golden Age: Heroes of the Postwar Era 1946-1967 and then the smaller but also elegant Goggles & Dust, essentially a photo album of racing in the 1920s and 1930s with limited text. The latest book, Shoulder to Shoulder, is subtitled Bicycle Racing in the Age of Anquetil and while it shares the smaller format of Goggles & Dust its contents are much closer to the spirit of our age than the earlier volume, whose antediluvian...

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