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Sempé’s brilliant cartoon strip about class, congestion, cars and bicycles

by carltonreid / on October 17, 2013 / / posted in 1890s, 1900-1905, 1905-1918, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s

Jean-Jacques Sempé – France’s most celebrated cartoonist – likes bicycles, perhaps because one of his first jobs was delivering wine by bicycle through the rolling hills of the Gironde. He has drawn them many times, most famously for The New Yorker, including a wonderful cover image illustration of a bike shop in 1983 and a cover cartoon of a Tour de France style race in 1999. (The New Yorker seems to have a soft spot for cycling: check out all the many covers the mag has devoted to the joys of pedalling).

The most appropriate cartoon for a history book about cycling and motoring is the one below, printed in Rien n’est Simple of 1962. It’s historically spot-on and the last image is still highly relevant today.

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Spotter: Oliver of Hackney Cycling Campaign told me about this particular cartoon. I tracked down the book. It’s very, very funny.

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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.

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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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