There appears to be some text missing at the end of page 69. Angel Garcia Long Valley, NJ
Jay Van de Velde wrote:
On page 12 of this new publication is an image of an 1899 Eagle Quad Stay
> bicycle, under the heading " An English Model".
>
> First, the Eagle Quad Stay is of Americ
> an manufacture, not English. Second, the image was captured from my websi
> te and can be seen at the link below.
>
You are not the only one the authors ripped off. On page 77, they show Rebour drawings of the Merckx hour record bike. Those were taken directly from the Bicycle Quarterly web site. I compiled the drawings from several Le Cycle articles, so it is pretty obvious when they are assembled exactly the way I assembled them at
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com/
Of course, I took the images from Le Cycle, so I don't claim copyright, but at least they could attribute the photos to the original source.
There are quite a few "stolen" images in the book. You can easily tell, because most are at 72 dpi, so the reproduction quality is terrible. (The print version of Bicycle Quarterly had the same drawings at 300 dpi resolution.) The worst is a photo of a Campy toolkit on p. 144. I'd be ashamed to publish a photo like that! (If they had asked me, I gladly would have provided high-resolution scans.)
I can see the temptation to lift images from various web sites. It's easy and cheap. For comparison, our new book "The Competition Bicycle" involved spending $ 50,000 on photography, including $ 3000 for historic photos from a variety of sources, which range from gifted amateurs to the best professional photographers. Not only that, but finding the photographers was a major task. It took me weeks to get a good photo of Eddy Merckx at the 1974 World Championships in Montreal. The bike is on the cover of the book, and my goal was to show the exact bikes in the historic photos, rather than generic photos of Merckx et al. (Few European photographers travelled to Canada at the time, and bike racing wasn't major news in North America yet.)
Those "stolen" images in the Campy book contrast glaringly with Campagnolo's publicity shots and a few other original photos. Those are reproduced very nicely.
Overall, I am not too impressed by the book. It offers little new insight into the history of the company. The Delta brakes in Rouleur magazine and Hiroshi Ichikawa's article on the genesis of the Campagnolo Gran Sport derailleurs (published in Bicycle Quarterly) will give you more insight than the respective chapters in the book. The ultimate history of Campagnolo still needs to be written. It's a fascinating story that needs more substance than the marketing blurbs that make up this latest book.
A full review of the Campagnolo book will be in the Winter 08 issue of Bicycle Quarterly.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
140 Lakeside Ave #C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.bikequarterly.com