January 13, 2010

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a guy who knows a lot about old bikes. He’s got multiple degrees, in disparate subjects like mathematics and geology, and he knows how to do a good scientific analysis. But he loves old bicycles, and he loves good bicycles (not that the two are necessarily the same thing), and he knows what makes a good bike good.

He’d been telling me about Rene Herse and Alex Singer, and building up a pretty good head of steam enthusing over these guys, and over the evolutionary approach that they took to bicycle design. They’d each sponsor a team of fast sport riders and build bikes for them. Then the riders, experienced men (women too—Lyli Herse could ride my legs off and yours too, and she’s reached an age and class where garden trowels and triangular sandwiches are more the norm) would tell them what worked and what didn’t. The result was bikes of integrated design, with racks and generator lights, with hubs that allowed a spoke replacement without removing the wheel, and fenders that didn’t rattle. I knew that a new Singer (pronounced Saun-zher) goes for 6900 Euros, not including the trip to Paris to get measured up.

So I asked him, speaking as a poor scribbler, what builder could approximate Singer or Herse performance, but at a price more associated with PayPal than a mortgage. He didn’t hesitate: Jack Taylor, he said. They got the geometry right.

So I did my research. If you know anything at all about old bikes, you know the Taylor brothers story, how they built a frame shop in a tiny, urban-blighted English town; that Norm (a hard man on the road, gentle in person) brazed the frames, Jack designed and painted, and Ken built up the wheels and bikes. They used French-dimensioned tubing, and rode hundreds of miles a week to figure out the fine points. Over four decades give or take, they built close to ten thousand bikes, including unicycles, BMXers, and youth. But mostly they were touring, racing and sport riding bikes, with geometry that let you stay in the saddle all day, take both hands off the bars to grab a bite or pull off a sweater, or choose a road with decaying pavement.

Being a good little rabbit, I immediately started searching EBay, Craig’s, and Classic Rendezvous for a Jack. I wanted one with a compliant frame, 700c wheels, and a front rack. Paint didn’t matter, as all my bikes get ugly in a hurry; size 58 please.

With nearly ten thousand of them out there, I could afford to get picky. This one was too much money, that one too small. (You can find anything in 56cm, but 58s are a lot more scarce.) Another came with sew-ups, one more with Super Tourist tubing. Sigh. All these choices, no perfection.

One seller had been present when the Taylor works closed down, and bought Norm’s repair stand. It’s the old kind, with a cradle for the bottom bracket and a spar running up to catch the down tube. The base is just a big can that you fill up with sand, and it was plastered with decals, for Jack Taylor bikes, local bands, and television characters. While he didn’t have the Taylor bike that I wanted, he did offer to sell me this stand, which I jumped all over. At the time I was fantasizing about becoming a frame builder, and I assumed that if Norm Taylor had used it, it would be useful to me.

In between the time that I wrote the check and the stand arrived, Norm Taylor, aged eighty-something, slipped away for that ride that you don’t come back from. And just as immediately, all the Jack Taylor bikes disappeared out of the market.

Obviously, there weren’t going to be any more Jack Taylor bikes. But there weren’t going to be anymore anyway. Norm had been living in a nursing home, Jack was too feeble to travel, and all three of them had been happy to close the shop and retire. Ten thousand of anything, whether it’s bicycle frames or French fries, is enough for a lifetime, and if the world wants more, then it’s probably too greedy.

I turned Norm’s stand into a bedside lamp, by clamping a photographer’s clamp-lamp to it and filling the base with non-authentic sand. I mean, now it’s a collector’s item, and I dare not pollute its patina with my own brazing fumes. And the price of Taylors, one and all, has jumped from ‘enough money to notice’ to ‘too much to think about.’

I’m reminded about all this by a posting on the iBob list yesterday, where a fellow was selling a 700c Taylor frame, size 57, with fenders and racks, for 300 dollars. The paint looked like the bottom of a city garbage can, and the derailleur hanger was for one of those long-extinct Cyclos. And it was gone before I could send the email, likely gone in the first five minutes.

As cyclists, we like to pretend to be complete pragmatists, justifying titanium bolts and 125lb tires for speed, and a stable of bikes for varying conditions. The reality is, the fashion market is as absurd here as it is for antique cars that you can’t actually travel in, or stamps that won’t carry a letter. Two years ago, nobody could spell ‘randonneur.’ Now Vittoria has a tire with that name, and an EBay search turns up two pages of bike items.

But when you boil it down, I’m not hurt by my lack of a Jack. Yeah, after talking with the Doctor of Old Bike Science, I wanted to start training for Paris-Brest-Paris. I wanted a Jack Taylor to hold me over ‘til I could get a Singer. And I wanted to ride those bikes like a champion. The reality is that I work out of town for a year at a time; that I’m forty five, and that this year’s goal of riding a double metric, without dying, is no more likely to be attained than it was last year. In a way, having a randonneur bike is no different than riding a Trek Madone, or the Raleigh 753 I drooled over as a teen. It’s just a form of posing, albeit in wool instead of Lycra. You can call it hope, or a dream, or a useless fantasy. But it all starts with actually riding, with using all those bikes that are choking my front bedroom, your garage, our imaginations. So I hope you’ll excuse me now. It may be twenty degrees here, but I need to get some miles.