Made in England: The Artisans Behind the Handbuilt Bicycle

I received this book as a Christmas gift and as soon as it arrived I sat down to begin reading it. The best part about the book is the insight that you gain from the interviews with each builder; their philosophies, their ideas, their stories.The photography is quite good but much more on the arty side than the documentary style. That's OK but I would have preferred more pictures of the bikes too. Also, I found myself looking for the description alongside each photo to understand exactly what I was looking at. They don't exist in this book. That's a pity in my view.On the whole though, I love this book and I wish that I had the money to go out and commission some frames from the builders that I liked most in the book.

I was in two minds whether to buy this book, but I am glad I did. I am a great fan of anything made in England, and this goes into the workshops of many of my heroes. The price is steep, but it's a book I shall return to many times in the future to dream of owning one of these handbuilt beauties.

As a book production, this is simply wonderful. The design ecoes the best recent work in the cycling press in magazines like rouleur and Peloton. This means superb natural light photogaphy and great book design. Apart from that, the authors pick some of the finest contemporary builders. The book sadly contains one article. on Ron Cooper, that makes a splendid epitaph; Ron Cooper died in December 2012, and this is probably the last inyerview he gave. A wonderful book.

Overall, this is a lovely book with some fantastic photos and interviews with frame-builders at all stages of their craft, some just starting out and others with 60 years experience. The bicycles are a delight to look at, with some radical new designs alongside more traditional frames.However, the thing which mars this book for me is the poorly-written copy and some typographical errors which detract from the "quality feel" one might expect. Given that it is a book about craftsmanship, a phrase like "Robin's bikes literally speak for themselves" seems like sloppy (or non-existent) editing. Talking bicycles, whatever next! There are several places where sentences are ended with a spurious full stop ("wasn't talking to you!". and "could you help me?".) which is such a basic error. It's also quite basic that an ellipsis ... is not followed by a full-stop - you get one or the other, not both! Also, the use of em-dashes, en-dashes and hyphens is very inconsistent.If you admire fine typography, this book goes part of the way but again is marred by errors like underlining text (a big no-no in print) and layout errors like"freshly welded S& S couplers"which might have come out better as "freshly-welded S&S couplers," at least keeping the S&S bit together for ease of reading. Non-existent paragraph leading and/or indentation means it's often quite tricky to find the start of a paragraph, and the typefaces for the headings and pull-quotes are a bit tricky to read as well.These might seem like "niggles" but for a book at this price and quality, it makes the book less pleasurable and more difficult to read. Given the quality of the photos, I'm left with a book which is almost beautiful, about one of my favourite subjects, but ultimately is unsatisfactory.

Just fantastic, I cannot recommend it highly enough, it's a well presented book that's a pleasure to own. It has a good variety of frame builders ranging from relatively unknown to legendary. I bought it as a present, but I'm not sure I want to give it away anymore.

I bought this book for my cycle- loving family.They are very pleased to read about the manufacturers and their innovations inthe days before the Chinese cornered the market.

Superb: Nice stories, good insights and inside looks in the minds of great bike-builders. And a very good graphicly designed book!

This book promised so much but delivered absolutely nothing. Boring repetitive interviews, foul language, bad editing - not what I expected at all. Could have been a beautiful book because the subject is superb. Goodness knows how any professional publisher would allow this trash to appear in print.

awesome reading lots of industry inside facts

for a bike lover it's a great book.