On my annual Thanksgiving visit to Little Rock, AR, where my mother and my wife's sister live, I hit all the bike shops but found nothing of classic interest, except for Skip Lyle's bikes on loan to the Chainwheel and also to a new shop called Bikeseller.com for display purposes only. The old parts have now pretty much been cleaned out, partly by me on previous Thanksgiving visits. The Chainwheel display, BTW, still does include the very early Richard Sachs discussed here a while back.
However, I dropped by "Books-A-Million", a bookstore chain I had never seen before and discovered a few bike magazines I was not previously aware of. Two were US-published road bike magazines, one called "Roadie". These were both, IMHO, the same pretentious, yuppie, poseur, hypercommercial crap that we have unfortunately come to expect from US-based publications. But there was also a UK publication called Procycling, which seems to have the same type of coverage as Cycle Sport. Lots of colored photos like Cycle Sport (albeit not by Graham Watson). Well done news reports and interviews. Even had a nice Retro article (seems to be a regular feature) which noted that Richard Virenque this year surpassed the record for KoM victories in the TdFpreviously shared by Bahamontes and Van Impe, and examined the question of whether Virenque is a greater climber than those two. (My opinion? NFW!!) There were several photos each of Bahamontes, Van Impe, and also Charly Gaul, with quotes from them and discussions of their careers. Enough to warm a retrogrouch's heart.
I've been looking for an alternative since Cycle Sport began publishing a separate US edition, fearing that any publication under US editorship would rapidly deteriorate. In all fairness, I must say that hasn't really happened yet, and the current issue actually has a lot of classic interest, devoting much of the space to a review of the careers of Indurain, Delgado and Ocana. OK, so Delgado and Indurain are past the 1983 cutoff date, but Ocana is certainly On Topic. Nonetheless, I find Procycling interesting. What do the UK members think of this mag? Has it been launched fairly recently, or is it just yet another UK publication of which we Yanks have long been ignorant?
On another topic, I finally today received two British Racing Green B-17 Champion Specials that had been on backorder from Nashbar for over 3 1/2 months. It had been so long, I had to check the invoice to see if I got a good price, as I'd long since forgotten what I paid. Have LBS's been experiencing this sort of delay on Brooks? Has it been all models/colors or just the green ones? Maybe my receiving these is an indication that Brooks is finally catching up with demand. Always hesitate to mention Nashbar, as the LBS owners here see them as a rival. On the other hand, they have retained more interest in classic-type stuff than their parent Performance, and are a pretty fair source for classic stuff, although their classic offerings are sporadic and unpredictable.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Houston, TX