The blog

Book goes on tour (and it’s not even written yet)

by carltonreid / on May 21, 2014 / / posted in Book news

You know when I said I had just two chapters left to write? I split each of ’em in half so I now have four chapters left to write. The book is getting fatter and fatter. I’m really looking forward to letting it fly.

BTW That’s the final cover artwork but not the book’s final cover typography: that will be drawn by Paul Robson soon. And the strap line changes to “How cyclists were the first to push for good roads and became the pioneers of motoring.”

Meanwhile, some very nice and kind people have invited me to give talks about the book:

6th JUNE
THE FRED FESTIVAL, Belfast
1-2pm. The Mac, St. Anne’s Square

12th JUNE
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL OF CYCLING, Edinburgh
6.30.pm. South Sider pub, a 10 min walk from Waverley station.

12th JULY
BRISTOL CYCLE FESTIVAL, Bristol
Time and venue to be announced.

16th SEPTEMBER
CYCLOX, Oxford
Time and venue to be announced.

The talks are loosely based around the subject matter in the book and feature lots of pix projected from an iPad with the slides flipped through via an iPhone, hence the gratuitous iPhone shot above. Do you like the custom iPhone case? It was done for me by the sweet folks at Mr Nutcase.

Oh, and here are the book chapters:

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"How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring." ROADS WERE NOT BUILT FOR CARS is a print, Kindle, iPad and free e-book about roads history.

The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.

'Roads Were Not Built for Cars' is a history book, focussing on a time when cyclists had political clout, in Britain and especially in America. The book researches the Roads Improvement Association - a lobbying group created by the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1886 - and the Good Roads movement organised by the League of American Wheelmen in the same period.

The book was published in a Kickstarter limited-edition in September 2014. Island Press of Washington, D.C. published a revised second-edition in April 2015.

Thanks to research grants and advertising support, text-only PDF chapters from the book are slowly being made available for free to read online. The free distribution model is being used in order to get the book seen by as many eyes as possible. The paid-for publications are richly illustrated; the free versions have had the pix stripped out and replaced with adverts.

To get notification of the paid-for and free publications subscribe to the (infrequent) email newsletter. See below or in the sidebars.

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MOTORISTS' FRONT OF JUDEA: Apart from the pneumatic tyre, ball bearings, differential gears, roads, motoring, car ads, and aviation, what have the cyclists ever done for us?

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