A while ago I was sent Fancy Cycling to review. Fancy Cycling 1901 was first published in 1901, and documents all sorts of tricks to do on your bike. Yes, they were doing tricks on their bikes, back in 1901! This won’t be news to any of you who’ve heard about the bicycle craze that swept the world at the end of the nineteenth century. What makes Fancy Cycling so much fun are the photos accompanying each trick described. They feature poker-faced edwardians, in suits or corsets and petticoats, diligently executing all sorts of tricks on their bicycles, which back then, were fixed gear. One interesting aspect of the book is that many of the photos show women performing tricks on their bikes, and it is written by a woman, Isabel Marks. How many contemporary books/videos/photos show women performing tricks on bikes? (no, not those kind of tricks ……) Val and I wanted to review the book for 3CR’s Yarra Bike Radio Show but it seemed appropriate to have someone ‘test’ the book in a practical sense. Sanso from Itchy the Movement kindly offered to help us out. If you’ve spotted a group of riders at Melbourne Museum lately, clutching a book and between fits of giggles, performing strange contortions on their bikes, well that just may have been them. Here is the podcast from the Yarra BIKE show on 3CR when Sanso came in to tell us all about Fancy Cycling.
Yarra Bike Radio Show on 3CR # 
If you’d like to test out a few of the tricks in Fancy Cycling then get in touch with Sanso over at Itchy the Movement.
postcards from the north 