Tag: book

Ride Bike! A book about Jobst Brandt

I just kicked in some cash to support the Jobst Brandt Ride Bike! book.

Jobst Brandt and a friend sit at a table in an ice cream parlor. Jobst wears a blue polypropylene bike jersey with yellow trim and a Fredy Ruegg Velos cycling cap, while his friend, who is looking into a paper cup, wears a white and purple bicycle jersey and a yellow ag2 cycling cap.
Jobst Brandt with a friend sitting at the Foster Freeze in Boulder Creek, California.

Jobst Brandt, who passed away at age 80 in 2015, was a gruff, know-it-all Bay Area mechanical engineer who developed bicycle computers, a touring bicycle shoe, and high performance bicycle tires. He’s perhaps best known for freely giving advice on the various bicycling forums on Usenet back before Jack Dorsey invented Social Media. Brandt authored The BIcycle Wheel, which remains the authoritative work on building bicycle wheels.

I ran into him exactly once. He and a friend were bicycling over Highway 9 from his Palo Alto home as is his custom when they stopped at the Foster Freeze in Boulder Creek, California, where he held court and opined on farm tractor design and computer company logos.

He’s also known for touring all over the Alps on unimproved roads, and leading crazy rides on dirt roads througout the San Francisco Bay Area, all on skinny high pressure sew-up tubular tires. You can read about some of Brandt’s adventures at the blog of Ray Hosler, another legendary local road cyclist.

Isola Press in the UK have launched a Kickstarter to publish a book on the life of Jobst Brandt. They promise to share some of the thousands of photos from his life. I’m still a fanboy of Brandt and I admit to an unreasonable level of excitement. You can learn more about this project at the Kickstarter Project Page.

Free books about bikes

Happy New Year, everybody.

I’m giving these books (and one t-shirt – unused, of course!) away right here on this blog after the New Year.


Giving these books away

It’ll be first come, first serve, so be on your toes. I’ll do a giveaway each day of the week beginning on Wednesday, January 2. It’ll mostly be whoever comments first, though I might include a trivia contest a couple of times as well. Shipping to USA only, though I’ll consider international if you pay shipping and can pay me through PayPal.

Book: Team 7-Eleven

I’ll tell you this book on the beginnings of American professional road cycling in the 1980s reads good, smells good, and has lots of good photos (color and B&W). I received this book over the weekend and devouted it. I won’t have time to post a review before Interbike, so I’ll just say “thumbs up” and post the press material for now.

If you’d rather skip the marketing fluff and go get the book already, here’s the link to Powell’s Books.

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