Coffee Table Book of: The Sport of Cycling (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: The Sport of Cycling is a large format book of cycling, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: the bicycle and its parts, the first machines of the sport, frame building and care, mountain passes, cobbled lanes, gravel tracks and forest trails empty at every hour and season, and a few riders seen far off in plain dark clothing.

The kit is laid out plain: a drop handlebar wrapped in cork coloured tape, a leather saddle on coiled springs, a bottle in its wire cage, a polished hub and its spokes, a frame pump, a chainring and a cluster of rear cogs, an inner tube with tyre levers, an oil can beside a coiled chain, a cotton cap with fingerless gloves, a wool jersey with its back pockets, and a wheel with a knobbly tyre caked in mud.

The past runs from a wooden running machine with no pedals, an iron velocipede, a high wheeler and an early safety bicycle, through an old brass lamp, a toe clip pedal, a wheel with a wooden rim, gear levers on the down tube, leather shoes, a leather hairnet helmet and a spare tubular tyre folded in two loops. The making and care follow tubes and lugs laid out to be joined, a lug glowing in a brazing flame, a bare frame on its hook, tools on a board and a wheel in a truing stand.

Road, track, touring, gravel, mountain and BMX bicycles stand alone in wide views: at a cairn on a stony pass, in a bare hall, on a lake shore, on an open moor, on a rocky ridge, by a mountain road at blue hour and high above a sea of cloud at sunrise.

Short notes run through the book, on the parts of the bicycle and their care, the first machines and the history of the sport, and the road, the track and the trail: country roads are at their quietest in the first hour after dawn, the chainring and crank turn together with every push on the pedals, a track bicycle has a single fixed gear and no brakes, and older bicycles changed gear with small levers on the down tube.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.