Product Description

Scooters are funny. They are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturised monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas, the stranger the better. They are two-wheeled pogo sticks, Italian hairdryers, Pushmans, dustbins on wheels, motorised lemons. Their names can be swear words, or their names can be uttered in worship by the faithful. They are the weird and the wonderful. They are the cute, the quaint, and the curious. Throughout the ages, motorscooters have meant different things to different folk. Scoots have been cheap transportation for people without enough pennies for a car. They have been rebellious hot rods for misunderstood Wild Ones. They have carried lovers and warriors, priests and poets, and many a movie star. Explaining what inspires the scooter faithful ain't easy either. Tell a pal you like scoots and some hoot, some holler, most all smirk. Others nod, and immediately launch into a dialectical discussion of the brake swept area on the first generation of 98cc Vespas. Explanation is not needed. If you have to ask, you just ain't gonna understand - and most Harley-Davidson folk don't have a clue what we're talking here. This is a colourful, authoritative, and ultimate history of the little motorbikes that could. Starting from the first scooter craze nearly a century ago, the authors chronicle the American scooter boom, the golden age of scooters, and the rise of the Mods in England. Today, nostalgia for Vespas, Cushmans, and Lambrettas is driving a new thirst for cool scooters in motorcycle dealer showrooms. This compendium of all things scooterific includes a comprehensive marque-by-marque encyclopaedia of scooters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #808314 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-30
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"Free 2 Wheel," February 2006
"Authors Michael and Eric Dregni, two obviously knowledgeable fanatics, have compiled a fascinating read that chronicles the history and development of these little whizzers from little more than motorized versions of a child's push scooter, to the plastic, fantastic Ialian and Japanese creations being produced currently.
"Those enamored with facts and figures will swoon over the second half of the book, a 126-page appendix cataloging scooter companies and the vehicles they made.
.,."pull up a chair and spend a few hours lost in a world where the wheels are small and the horsepower is low. A good book for open-minded motorcyclists and a must for scooter fiends, "The Scooter Bible "provides a refreshing, informative, and humorous look at the little vehicles that get no respect. Guaranteed it will teach you all you need to know about these little putters."

Customer Reviews

Cushman? Please!
This book provides a good historical overview of the scooter from its origins as an early 20th-century runabout for people who knew nothing about motorcycles, through its adaptation for belligerent purposes as a means of getting paratroopers to battle, and its postwar rebirth as a symbol of youthful independence and continental vibrancy. However, many of the illustrations are badly annotated, with scooters often identified as the wrong models, and the sleek, polished lines of 1950s Lambrettas and Vespas - truly utilitarian vehicles that sold in their millions, helping to get a ravaged continent back to work - seem to play second fiddle to the appallingly agricultural Cushman and its workmanlike derivatives, whose only claim to fame is that they were built in the US. Yet another sad example of Uncle Sam rewriting the history book (this time in favour of the mutant offspring of a lawnmower and a portable toilet) over the sublime creations of Corradino D'Ascanio and Ferdinando Innocenti. Worth a look but there are better books out there for European scooter buffs.