Vintage Lambretta Scooter Print - Young Lovers - Scooter Date - La Scooter Perfecta

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

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

The story of a simple graphic can sometimes explode in so many directions you wonder which twists and turns to throw on the table. I'd gone to Mexico City to escape the aftermath of a big celebration in Port Arthur, Texas that had gone horribly wrong. The city was still pretty beat up after the earthquake of '85, but everything was very clean and damaged areas crisply boarded up.

I had planned to go anyway after buying a box of folded and fragile yet amazing 1940s Mexican movie posters from the remarkably weathered remains of the Irving Klaw organization some years earlier, when they were in a second floor loft on fourteenth street. I figured, and it proved to be so since all film distribution was handled by a government monopoly, that somewhere in this great and ancient city was the elephant's graveyard of Mexican movie posters. But that's another story...

I found the antiques and junque market on Saturday, bought a medium sized stack of profusely illustrated early 50s Union Sovietica magazines that made it clear that the Russkies had bigger and more of everything, their cheeks were ruddier, their fields pregnant with wildly yellow wheat and my favorite, their technology was crazier and more mad scientist looking than anything we had here. All in Spanish!

Then, in a box of miscellanea, was this small, cheaply printed flier, made in Spain, advertising the very Italian Lambretta motor scooter of which I owned several, including a TV200 and an early model only ever ridden by nuns (True! The Medical Mission Sisters of Fox Chase between 1956 and 1960, and only around their compound).

I was pinned to the Earth, grinning at the strange serendipity that brought this piece of paper from Spain to Mexico City and dumped it on a table in front of me at this precise moment.

We did considerable work to it to make it this beautiful, and in person it has considerably more pop and brilliance. Stop by the studio and I'll be happy to show you the original as well as the groovin' final result.

• 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.