Leanings

LEANINGS

Library science

Peter Egan

JUST BEFORE WE MOVED FROM CALIfornia back to rural Wisconsin a few years ago, Mayflower sent a woman over to the house to estimate our moving costs. “The heaviest things you own,” she said, “are all these books and magazines. We charge 40 cents a pound to move them, so you might want to get rid of things you’ll never read again.”

Good advice, and we did just that. While Barb and I are both natural-born book accumulators, we did manage to give away several hundred pounds of volumes whose inner pages would be unlikely ever to see the light of day again: dog-eared spy novels with titles like The Bridgebourne Conjugation, Physiology 101 textbooks that predated the discovery of lungs, and all travel books claiming you can see Europe for less than $50 a day.

I even went through my old flying magazines and saved only those featuring old warbirds or classic airplanes such as Stearmans and Cubs, or those with stories by Ernest Gann, Richard Bach or James Gilbert. Bizjet issues got the heave-ho.

Motorcycle magazines?

Sorry. No cuts here. I didn’t even think about it.

Eve been buying and hoarding motorcycle magazines since I reached the age of reason (pinpointed as the moment at which we actually begin to question reason, such as that which prevents us from buying a motorcycle) in the early Sixties, and the magazines are, more than anything else I’ve owned, survivors.

They’ve lived through a parental move to a new house in high school, through a succession of college dorm rooms and low-rent apartments, survived home-basement storage for two years while I was in the Army (which explains that subtle aroma of mildew), been carried up the stairs and filed into the bookshelves of seven different houses after our marriage, been trucked from Wisconsin to California and back again.

They’ve even survived those periodic but short-lived ascetic moods where I feel overwhelmed by clutter and purge the house of excess objects. All this, and I’ve never ditched a single issue of any motorcycle magazine.

There are several reasons for this. Foremost is probably simple consumerism. As I mentioned in a recent column, there are very few motorcycles whose possible ownership I would entirely rule out. I know from long experience that it’s perfectly feasible I could wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly find myself in the mood to own, say, a 305 Super Hawk. Or I could look through the motorcycle classifieds in the morning paper and see for sale a Triumph Triple (as if I haven’t suffered enough) or a Harley XLCR, two other objects of enduring interest.

And when these moods strike-or the ads appear-there’s no substitute for walking over to your friendly 16ton wall of carefully categorized magazines (moved at 40 cents per pound) and pulling the issue with that year’s road test off the shelf. Then you get yourself a cup of coffee, sit back in a comfortable chair and soak in another fine piece of motorcycle history.

Once you’ve read the specific road test, of course, you are forced to pull the file for the entire year, look in the “Advertisers Index” for each issue and look at all the manufacturer’s ads for the bike at hand.

This, in turn, leads to the re-reading of dozens of other unconnected road tests, race reports and articles. “Geez, there’s Kenny Roberts at Sacramento, looking like he’s about 14-and winning. And here’s Cal Rayborn at the Anglo-American Match Races. What a rider he was. Cycle World goes to the ISDT, and, good Lord, here’s the first full road test on the Honda 750 Four. An ad for a helmet that looks like a stroker cap made of Formica, a pathetic idea, created for motorcycle apologists. (“Nice golf hat, Bob, but why the chin strap?”) The BSA girls always look a little more like tarts than the Norton girls, but the Bultaco girls looked better. Cool, refined. A history of Velocette...maybe I’d better look up a road test on the 500 Thruxton again.”

And so on. It can go on for hours. In fact, my wife Barbara can’t believe the number of times I’ve dragged out the road test for the Honda CB550 Four, another bike I wanted at the time and never bought, but will. “Are you reading that again?” she asks. Modern stuff, too, gets the treatment. I’ve read the road tests for the new Ducati 900SS and the Honda VFR750 so many times the print is fading.

What’s really sick, is that I will read a road test I wrote, 10 or 12 years ago, to see if the bike is any good and if I still want to buy one. (“Hey, this guy really knows what he’s talking about!”) Or I’ll read my own riding impression of, say, the CBX or GB500, just to remind myself what it was like.

In any case, these magazines, old and new, have remained a part of my regular diet for approximately 30 years, like pizza or Mexican food. There are no cobwebs or dust in this particular corner of the bookshelves, and, as long as my eyesight holds out, there probably never will be.

When my younger relatives finally cart me off to the Golden Age Farm because I can’t remember to turn off the stove burner under the oil for the taco shells, I hope they have the presence of mind to bring the entire musty magazine collection along with me, over the probable objections of the white-suited nurses and staff.'

That way, while the other patrons are drinking prune juice and making jewelry boxes out of Popsicle sticks, I can sit out on the porch and re-read the technical teardown on Buddy Elmore’s factory Triumph 500 to see how they got the crazy thing to run for 200 miles at Daytona without blowing its oil all over the back tire.

Also, my room will have that reassuring smell of late-Sixties mildew from the basement of some nearly forgotten home. □