Cyclepedia - new book showcases fantastic private bike collection

If you like poring over pictures of stunning bikes, your cravings may be temporarily satisified with the publication next Monday of a photo-rich book that really should be sold in the proverbial brown wrapper. Cyclepedia – A Tour of Iconic Bicycle Designs, features nearly 100 bikes from the Embacher Collection.

From Chris Boardman’s ground-breaking Mike Burrows-designed Lotus TT bike to the Brompton Titanium S2L-X, the book takes a tour of bicycle design from the 1920s to the present day, with the main focus on the past four decades. You can find the full list of the bikes included here.

The bikes belong to Michael Embacher, who when he isn’t collecting some hugely desirable and often historic machines runs his own design studio in Vienna. He himself pens the introduction to the book, which also has a foreword by none other than Sir Paul Smith.

Specially commissioned studio photography captures each bike in all its glory, and there are also summaries of each one, as well as technical specifications and the particular machine’s history.

The book, which costs £19.95, will be published by Thames & Hudson on 4 April, and we’ll be reviewing a copy here on road.cc soon.

If that’s too long for you to wait to get your fill of fantastic photos of some stunning bikes from yesteryear, then we have a bonus for you in the shape of a website we stumbled across a little while back.

The website is the work of Miami, Florida resident Ray Dobbins, a collector of mainly Italian bikes, with photo galleries of 25 bicycles that he currently owns or used to own, some of them for sale.

The bikes, not to mention the galleries of dozens of photos of each, are pretty much museum quality, and worth an hour or two of anyone’s time.

We’re particularly smitten with this 1979 Gios Super Record which Ray appears to have auctioned off on eBay a while back. The gallery of 64 photos may take a while to load, but we hope you agree it’s well worth the wait.