Book News
BOOK NEWS
The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World’s Motorcycles
Edited by Erwin Tragatsch Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York $22.95 [320 pp]
There is a dirth of good books on motorcycling. Books which feature motorcycles to a great extent fall in two broad categories: books for motorcyclists and books for everybody. In the second group there are some notable titles: Thompson's journalistic Hell's Angels; Mandiargues’ literate novel The Motorcycle; Pirsig’s highly individual Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These volumes were written well enough to have a far broader appeal than to just the often undiscriminating, mono-maniacal motor-cyclist. A much larger collection of‘trashy’ books also exists, mostly as soft-cover originals which try to create in the buyer’s mind a thundering good epic of sex and violence: one lays out the money and finds that the author has never so much as straddled a Cushman Eagle, and the jacket artist deserves whatever honors are going around. This is a hustle, a come-on that will not deliver.
Then there are the books for motorcyclists only, which are usually honest in their approach and generally would bore the pants off of any non-motorcyclist. Your average citizen is not going to get swept away by Burgess and Clew’s history of the Velocette. These are informational books, full of the trivia that only a motorcyclist could love, and they belong alongside the Book of Records and the Book of Lists.
Erwin Tragatsch has long been an engineer and writer in the automotive and motorcycle (The World's Motorcycles 1894-1963) field, and now has edited a> large-format, one volume encyclopediatype book listing all the companies that ever produced a motorcycle. It is not a definitive work by any means, but it certainly has a lot of information that I never knew. The first section of the book has short, illustrated chapters on “The Pioneer Years”, “The Great Designers”, etc., followed by a thirty-page color section entitled “The Classic Bikes”, with photographs of some of the more famous marques—Indian, Scott, Brough Superior—on up to the present-day Gold Wing and Electra-Glide, which aren’t very classic, but there it is. The color photos are nice (who wouldn’t like to look at a 1912 Henderson 4 or a Black Shadow?), information very weak. After that the encyclopedic aspect of the book starts, with 250 pages of information ranging from Abako (Germany 1923-1925) to ZZR (Poland 1960 - ). Over the last 80 years there have been some 2500 companies involved in the production of motorcycles and they’re all listed here, along with an average of four photos or drawings a page, to give the reader an appreciation for the 1932 Moser 496cc ohv or the 1958 500cc Ratier. There just is not space for all the information one would like to see but Tragatsch does not pretend to be able to include all the information. He is what Webster’s Third Collegiate is to the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary. It is a nice, light once-over with a wonderful potential for winning bar bets. Did Maserati ever make motorcycles? They certainly did, lightweights from 1956 to 1961. Was there ever a Ferrari motorcycle? Yes, but it had no connection with the auto factory.
I’m glad Tragatsch’s book is here. I’ve read the damned thing through from cover to cover and loved it. It’s fun and that, short of a repair manual, should be a basic criterion for buying a book. 0
—Clement L. Salvadori
