Last weekends Guardian Newspaper in their Review section carried a cycling book review by William Fotheringham.
One book reviewed is about the bike building industry.
I'll probably by this book having read the review and the other book reviewed is written by professional Michael Barry.
Here are both reviews.
My first bike was a Hetchins. For most people that has no resonance, but there are those who understand. It wasn't just a bike. It was handed down from my father, and it was made by one of a legion of small-scale, artisanal cycle builders who welded up frames in the back of a shop and sold them out the front. It was made to last, and it did. But more than that, it was made to be completely distinctive: slender tubes, joined by lugwork tooled into intricate, gold-plated filigree. Each bike type had a Latin name: "Nulli Secundus", "Magnum Bonum". It was a work of art and craftsmanship.
It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels
by Robert Penn
208pp,Particular Books,£20Buy It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels at the Guardian bookshopRob Penn's quest to build the perfect cycle, It's All About the Bike, takes a brief spin past Hetchins, but does so to make a valid point: small-scale cycle frame builders are now as endangered as trug and clog makers. That's down to our acceptance of built-in obsolescence, and our perception that what is mass-produced must be cheaper. But frames like a Hetchins – and the Brian Rourke that Penn opts for – last half a century, and as he points out, they can be repaired anywhere, by someone with a blowtorch and welding rod.
Cyclists pore over the catalogues, websites and magazines known as "bike ****", but Penn's book is the cycling equivalent of Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus. Or it could be seen as a stretched version of the tale that all cyclists tell when the credit card statements arrive: no matter how shiny and costly the item of bike bling, there is a back story, usually a good one. Artfully, Penn turns his quest for new hardware – an activity most of us indulge in furtively on the internet – into a worldwide spin around cycling and its culture.
So a trip to a wheel builder deep in cycling's Californian hippy subculture leads him seamlessly to the birth of the mountain bike, conceived accidentally by a little group in Marin County who adapted city bikes to race down an insanely steep mountain fire trail. The course was nicknamed Repack, because each run would burn out their primitive brakes, meaning they had to be repacked with grease. The rest was a tale of fat tyres, and fat bank accounts in Taiwan, where most of the world's bikes are made.
That is not a new story, but it's worth the retelling. So too is the diversion around makers of Italian gadgets such as the flamboyant artists of Cinelli, makers of mint-flavoured feeding bottles ("smells better than plastic, yes?"). And there is a timely excursion around the lost world of the British cycle industry, born in the West Midlands, once the home of the largest concentration of bike and component makers in the world, now down to one company, Brooks, manufacturer of the legendary B17 saddle, first made in 1896 and possibly the oldest extant cycle component.
If Penn sings a paean to bike bits, Michael Barry's Le Métier – "the profession" – (200pp, Rouleur, £35) hymns a different kind of devotion. Barry, a Canadian pro of long standing, is a domestique, and is spending his July as wingman to the British Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins in Team Sky. The domestique concept is unique to cycling: he is the worker who trains and prepares every bit as meticulously and passionately as his leader, but whose role is to be a servant, not a winner. Barry will dedicate 20 days this July to Wiggins, shielding him from the wind, towing him back to the field if he punctures, pushing him if he wants to urinate while on the move.
Briefly – for this is a book of relatively few words – Barry sprints through team politics, doping, pen-portraits of stars such as Mark Cavendish, and explains the rhythms of the cycling year. Professional cycling amounts to far more than the Tour de France – it includes the Belgian one-dayer where he has what seems like a career-ending fall, and the secondary American race where he lands a rare win when allowed to race for himself.
As a profession it is all-consuming, with rare moments of respite. The physical effort and the battle with the elements – the heat of July, the winter rain – are a 12-month affair. A shot of a bus stop in Catalonia has this caption from photographer Camille J McMillan: "I sheltered for a while, shattered, freezing cold and wet. Michael [and training partners] David and Dan battled on. It was a hard slog getting back to them. I was on a Vespa."
It's not a cheap read, but in that Le Métier is the equivalent of a Hetchins it will last, and it is well done. Integrated books about the nature, rather than the history, of professional cycling are rare, and much thought has gone into this one. McMillan's pictures are accompanied by ephemera such as race numbers, the profiles of stages on the tiny cards handed out to the riders for their reference during races, and – strictly for the cycling nerds – a few of Barry's power-cum-heartrate graphs for races and training rides. These are the stuff of pro cycling life, and so too is one picture in particular: dead-eyed cyclists finding their rooms in a lightless corridor in an anonymous hotel after a stage in the Tour of the Basque country.
Amid the bling, the controversy, the glamour and the television images each July, it's easy to forget the daily, monthly, yearly grind of training, competition and travel. For Barry and company, it is truly all about the bike.
William Fotheringham's Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppi is published by Yellow Jersey, which will also publish his Cyclopaedia in September
One book reviewed is about the bike building industry.
I'll probably by this book having read the review and the other book reviewed is written by professional Michael Barry.
Here are both reviews.
My first bike was a Hetchins. For most people that has no resonance, but there are those who understand. It wasn't just a bike. It was handed down from my father, and it was made by one of a legion of small-scale, artisanal cycle builders who welded up frames in the back of a shop and sold them out the front. It was made to last, and it did. But more than that, it was made to be completely distinctive: slender tubes, joined by lugwork tooled into intricate, gold-plated filigree. Each bike type had a Latin name: "Nulli Secundus", "Magnum Bonum". It was a work of art and craftsmanship.
It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels
by Robert Penn
208pp,Particular Books,£20Buy It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels at the Guardian bookshopRob Penn's quest to build the perfect cycle, It's All About the Bike, takes a brief spin past Hetchins, but does so to make a valid point: small-scale cycle frame builders are now as endangered as trug and clog makers. That's down to our acceptance of built-in obsolescence, and our perception that what is mass-produced must be cheaper. But frames like a Hetchins – and the Brian Rourke that Penn opts for – last half a century, and as he points out, they can be repaired anywhere, by someone with a blowtorch and welding rod.
Cyclists pore over the catalogues, websites and magazines known as "bike ****", but Penn's book is the cycling equivalent of Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus. Or it could be seen as a stretched version of the tale that all cyclists tell when the credit card statements arrive: no matter how shiny and costly the item of bike bling, there is a back story, usually a good one. Artfully, Penn turns his quest for new hardware – an activity most of us indulge in furtively on the internet – into a worldwide spin around cycling and its culture.
So a trip to a wheel builder deep in cycling's Californian hippy subculture leads him seamlessly to the birth of the mountain bike, conceived accidentally by a little group in Marin County who adapted city bikes to race down an insanely steep mountain fire trail. The course was nicknamed Repack, because each run would burn out their primitive brakes, meaning they had to be repacked with grease. The rest was a tale of fat tyres, and fat bank accounts in Taiwan, where most of the world's bikes are made.
That is not a new story, but it's worth the retelling. So too is the diversion around makers of Italian gadgets such as the flamboyant artists of Cinelli, makers of mint-flavoured feeding bottles ("smells better than plastic, yes?"). And there is a timely excursion around the lost world of the British cycle industry, born in the West Midlands, once the home of the largest concentration of bike and component makers in the world, now down to one company, Brooks, manufacturer of the legendary B17 saddle, first made in 1896 and possibly the oldest extant cycle component.
If Penn sings a paean to bike bits, Michael Barry's Le Métier – "the profession" – (200pp, Rouleur, £35) hymns a different kind of devotion. Barry, a Canadian pro of long standing, is a domestique, and is spending his July as wingman to the British Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins in Team Sky. The domestique concept is unique to cycling: he is the worker who trains and prepares every bit as meticulously and passionately as his leader, but whose role is to be a servant, not a winner. Barry will dedicate 20 days this July to Wiggins, shielding him from the wind, towing him back to the field if he punctures, pushing him if he wants to urinate while on the move.
Briefly – for this is a book of relatively few words – Barry sprints through team politics, doping, pen-portraits of stars such as Mark Cavendish, and explains the rhythms of the cycling year. Professional cycling amounts to far more than the Tour de France – it includes the Belgian one-dayer where he has what seems like a career-ending fall, and the secondary American race where he lands a rare win when allowed to race for himself.
As a profession it is all-consuming, with rare moments of respite. The physical effort and the battle with the elements – the heat of July, the winter rain – are a 12-month affair. A shot of a bus stop in Catalonia has this caption from photographer Camille J McMillan: "I sheltered for a while, shattered, freezing cold and wet. Michael [and training partners] David and Dan battled on. It was a hard slog getting back to them. I was on a Vespa."
It's not a cheap read, but in that Le Métier is the equivalent of a Hetchins it will last, and it is well done. Integrated books about the nature, rather than the history, of professional cycling are rare, and much thought has gone into this one. McMillan's pictures are accompanied by ephemera such as race numbers, the profiles of stages on the tiny cards handed out to the riders for their reference during races, and – strictly for the cycling nerds – a few of Barry's power-cum-heartrate graphs for races and training rides. These are the stuff of pro cycling life, and so too is one picture in particular: dead-eyed cyclists finding their rooms in a lightless corridor in an anonymous hotel after a stage in the Tour of the Basque country.
Amid the bling, the controversy, the glamour and the television images each July, it's easy to forget the daily, monthly, yearly grind of training, competition and travel. For Barry and company, it is truly all about the bike.
William Fotheringham's Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppi is published by Yellow Jersey, which will also publish his Cyclopaedia in September
