At 1:42 PM -0700 10/26/08, Jerome & Elizabeth Moos wrote:
>By the way, I must agree with the earlier comment that the Campy
>book is not at all well organized. It is certainly not a
>comprehensive history of Campagnolo, nor even a particularly
>coherent one. But is does contain lots of interesting anecdotes and
>lots of nice photos, albeit that some of the photos seem to have be
>obtained discourteously if not actually illegally. I stiil think it
>was a bargain at the $24 eBay price and maybe even at the $40 retail
>price.
As you say, if you treat it as a "Campagnolo scrapbook," then it may be worth the money. You get some nice photos, some good reproduction of random Campy catalogue pages and some anecdotes about how Campagnolo wooed the press and sports authorities into supporting his company.
To me, the most grating part of the book are the many careless errors. I am afraid that we will spend a few decades on this list discussing whether Huret Jubilee derailleurs really were introduced in the 1960s (1972 appears to be the correct date), whether the Campagnolo Record derailleur dates from the mid-1950s (1962), and whether the Gino Bartali-Fausto Coppi rivalry lasted from 1950 until 1965... at which point Bartali had been in retirement for a decade, and Coppi had been dead five years!
(The Coppi-Bartali rivalry was at its height in 1948, when they watched each other during the world championships, and each was unwilling to pull the other. The rest of the bunch left them behind, and both abandoned the race in disgrace. Coppi and Bartali did work together in the 1949 Tour de France, as I described in a chapter of "The Competition Bicycle" that shows their bikes from that race. Coppi came first, Bartali second, as a result of their truce.)
A fact-check would have required little more than going to Chuck Schmidt's Campagnolo timeline and to the Wikipedia website. Instead, we'll be stuck with this information from an "authoritative" source.
Jan Heine
Editor
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