40/4 pages
148 x 210 mm, rounded corners
printed in two colours (red and black) on 135/300 g/m2 paper
about 275 terms and illustrations
1st edition 2014 / 1000 copies
The long story behind the book (short)
In 2013 I was restoring an old 1974 Gitane "Tour de l'avenir" (by the way, it's the bike on the cover of the book - actually it's yellow). I had some trouble with the bottom bracket (and a lot of other things) and searched the internet for information on that. I discovered the website mytenspeeds.com from Canada which provides a lot of information on vintage roadbikes. I had to figure out all the bike-specific/technical terms in english which is something that exceeded my basic school-english.
A few days later I searched for some affordable benotto bartape on italian e-bay and I also saw a lot of other bikeparts and it's italian names (for example a chainring = corona).
I thought that it would be nice to have something like a multi-language list of all these bike-related terms, but all I could find on the internet was incomplete and not in the languages I had in mind.
So I came up with the idea to do this dictionary by myself and combine it with drawings of all the terms to make it easier to find what you are looking for. And I would love to have it in a printed form so you could carry it in your pocket while traveling or have somewhere close to your work desk.
All this was on my mind for a couple of weeks until I decided to just go for the project in the beginning of 2014.
Whenever I found the time besides my full-time job as a freelance graphic designer, I collected the terms I wanted to have in the book, did drawings, scans and colorization and was looking for help on the translations. Since there had to be some kind of limitation in languages due to layout reasons I focused on english, italian, french, japanese and german (the big bike-manufatcuring nations plus my homecountry Germany). Because of the technical background of the terms I thought I couldn't just ask native speakers I know - I don't think that the average person knows a "freeride" or "adjustable bearing cup" for example. So the best would be a native speaking bicycle-mechanic … This turned out to work only in the case of french and Jean-Michel Cauvin. Read more about that on the credits page.
I had to solve the problem of how to publish the book and finally came to the conclusion that it would be the best to do it all on my own. More questions occured: Do I need an ISBN number? Where to get it? How many copies? Where to print? What about printing costs? All this and additional drawing, colorization and layout happened in spring to fall 2014. Due to the different length of the terms in different languages, finishing the layout was finally possible when all the translation was done. This was the case in end of november and after some final changes data was sent to the print shop on 3rd of december 2014. The book is expected to de delievered to my office within the next - just in time for christmas!