Vintage Bicycle Print - Antique Bikes - Fin De Siècle France - Lovers

Treasures from THE VINTAGE & ANTIQUE BICYCLE COLLECTION at Lost Highways Archive & Research Library. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 24 x 18, and consciously formatted to work with a standard size store bought frame, or custom framed as you see fit.

First, you must understand our relationship to vintage and antique bicycles here at The Grand Review. I used to collect them, actively, back in the 80s when good vintage bikes were cheap as dirt. At the very end of the 80s I had a medium size warehouse building next to my house that had been a Mr Softee garage before I rented it, and I filled the rafters with two long lines of hanging bicycles. They glowed in the light from the skylights and carried along into the darkness at the far end. The good ones were up front, the rust buckets towards the back, but they all shared great lines and the effect was magical.

I met this charming gal at one point and invited her to go on a bicycle tour of all the old Fairmount Park mansions. There were four of us on vintage bikes bringing up the rear of the peloton, with everybody else on very expensive racing bikes except ol' Robert Montgomery Scott in the lead on some comically rickety late 60s bobo bike. You gotta love 'im! We came to a dramatic hill that was just too much to climb on the single speed early 50s Monarch balloon bike I'd lent her, so I got off my oversized post war Hercules rod brake and walked with her. Now, more than 20 years later, we're still together and still laughing, and we still have that Monarch hanging in the carriage house!

Now, mushy story aside, this print has been a subtle show stopper every time I've ever set up at an arts event. I hang it right at eye level, and people just step right into it, smiling from ear to ear. Ma femme has translated all of it for me, most of which went in one ear and out the other as I got all Gomez Adams over hearing her beautiful delivery of the lingo. Be still my heart! Anyway, the original is from a rather racy French humor magazine of the period. Dry rotted, acid burned and faded, printed on the cheapest newsprint, we worked this one pretty intensely and dammit, it works!

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.