Brochures

Brochures

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

IN THE CORNER OF ONE OF OUR UPSTAIRS bedrooms is an old steel file cabinet that is neither green nor brown, but one of those indeterminate colors that suggests it was invented by the government sometime before WWII for use by the FBI. I keep expecting to find the Alger Hiss files every time I open it. That, or more dirt on J. Edgar Hoover: “Look here, Barb. A photo of Hoover and Jack Ruby at some kind of stag party...Do you still have Oliver Stone’s phone number?’’

No such dark intrigue here, however. The top drawers are mostly old tax returns, and the bottom drawer is filled entirely with sales brochures, about 35 years’ worth. The back half is dedicated to guitars and amplifiers and contains such gems as “Harmony Guitars for 1966’’ and about 50 pounds of other slack-jawed drool inspiration, mostly from the Gibson, Fender, Guild, Gretsch, Rickenbacker and Marshall schools of material lust.

Dusty, forgotten memorabilia?

Would that they were. These things are exhumed and examined weekly, depending upon the shifting breezes of the collector instinct, which repeatedly cause me to raise sail and run aground.

The front half of the cabinet drawer contains motorcycle brochures, of course.

These are segregated by brand with brown manila dividers. The thickest one is Triumph, with Norton and Honda following a close second, backed up by slightly slimmer sections for Harley, Kawasaki and one catchall file marked “Eye-talian,” in honor of Ezra Pound’s inspired misspelling. There is also a pretty good Yamaha section from the RD350 and RD400 era, as well as a small cache of Suzuki info from the GS1000, early GSX-R and recent Dual-Purpose periods.

1 suppose the relative thickness of these files pretty well reflects the storage content of their owner’s brain. The first Triumph brochure I collected and toted home is from 1964. and I’ve been gathering them ever since, with the usual lapses that reflect the company’s own production gaps in the Seventies and Eighties. But it’s the midto-late Sixties stuff that’s most worn and dog-eared. If mere eye contact could wear out paper, my 1966-1970 Triumph brochures would look like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they almost do.

The Norton file is a little thinner, mostly because I wasn’t as powerfully attracted to Nortons-except for the superb Manx racing bikes-until the Commando models came along. So there’s lots of Commando stuff, with emphasis on the 1973-1975 bikes, leading up to my purchase of a brandnew 1975 850. '

Hondas, 1 note, show a remarkable concentration from the Superhawk years, followed by another surge in the mid-Seventies. By choice and chance I have owned five 1975 Hondas-a 750 Four, a 550 Four, two CB400Fs and an XL350-all purchases preceded and followed by lots of brochure gazing. From there, the literature skips from CBX to GB500 to VFR. with a solid clump of XL and XR info from nearly every year since their inception. I always own-or feel I am about to own at any moment-a dual-purpose bike; it’s a state of mind.

Why is the “Eye-talian” file so thin? I’ve had five Ducatis and have long admired Moto Guzzis, so what’s the deal? The deal is the Italians have historically been somewhat stingy with brochures. Or else their postal system doesn’t work. I’ve been trying to get a brochure for my current 900SS SP ever since I bought the bike last year, and the dealer still can't lay his hands on one.

It's probably the language barrier. Fortunately, the Italians are able to communicate quite clearly in steel, polished aluminum and red paint, so the lack of sales literature has never slowed me down much. You don’t have to speak Italian, after all, to enjoy a Sophia Loren movie. Also, the Italians tend to produce classy magazine ads, suitable for framing, which compensates somewhat for the empty sales literature rack.

I often wonder, however, if motorcycle manufacturers have any idea how many hundreds of hours a prospective buyer can spend staring at ,the pictures in a sales brochure, or reading the usually all-too-brief description, general puffery and model specifications, looking for clues and nuances of clues as to the personal rightness of the bike.

Some obviously do. Modern Triumph brochures for the new Triples and Fours are small masterpieces of photography and description. They draw you into their world and make you want to live there. (“Sell the farm, Barb, we’re moving to the Cotswolds!”)

Harley-Davidson, too, has done a bang-up job with sales literature; they make all the right connections between history, physical sensation, wide-open American spaces and big V-Twins. And, like Triumph, they make their brochures BIG, on nice thick glossy paper.

I would encourage this lavishness in any company that wants to sell me—or those poor impressionable souls who are like me-a motorcycle.

The very act of going to a dealership and bringing home a big color brochure is like a preview of the day when you go to that same shop and bring your new bike home. Good practice, all around.

Brochures are simply a mobile version of the nose against the display window. They allow us to bring the window home and ponder the view at our leisure, preferably while sipping a drink or eating popcorn in a large, comfortable chair.

I’ve spent entire evenings doing just that, staring at the pictures of a new bike and letting the image sink into my very bones, like radiant heat from a fireplace. Warms the skull and makes the nerve ends crackle and glow. To the casual observer of such a scene, nothing would seem to be going on, but it's these episodes of quiet, transfixed silence that are the true source of all motion in the universe.