The Scooter Bible: The Ultimate History and Encyclopedia

Description

The Scooter Bible is an entertaining, colorful, and authoritative history of the little motorbikes that could. Beginning with the first motor scooter in 1902, Eric Dregni is your guide to everything from the postwar American scooter boom to the golden age of Italian and European scooters, the rise of Mod scooter culture in England . . . right up to modern electric scooters. Today, nostalgia for vintage Vespas, Piaggios, Cushmans, Lambrettas, and other top brands drive a new thirst for retro-inspired scooters in showrooms around the world. This revised and updated edition of The Scooter Bible brings the story up to date with the drive for zero emissions via electric vehicles. Throughout, the authors offer you a wealth of imagery: historic black-and-white photos, evocative period advertisements, manufacturer photos, and more-over 300 images! Along the way, they show you scooter evolution, changing technologies, and scooter appearances in popular culture. And as the most comprehensive scooter book to ever grace the altar, The Scooter Bible also includes the world's most exhaustive encyclopedia of scooter brands, from Puddlejumper to Piaggio, Ducati to Doodlebug, and Zndapp Bella to Genuine Stella. The Scooter Bible is all you need before kick-starting your scooter engine to life and praying for ever more speed. Indeed, scooters are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturized monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas (the stranger the better). They are the weird and the wonderful. And they are all here in The Scooter Bible.

Eric Dregni is professor of English, journalism, and Italian at Concordia University in St. Paul. His obsessions range from motor scooters, about which he has authored and co-authored five books, to futuristic jet packs to oversized fiberglass town monuments to Zamboni ice resurfacers. He's turned his fixations into twenty books including Impossible Road Trip, Let's Go Fishing,Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of our Fantastic Future, Weird Minnesota, Midwest Marvels, Ads That Put America on Wheels, and Let's Go Bowling! Dregni worked in Italy for five years as a travel journalist and wrote about the experience in Never Trust a Thin Cook. In the summer, he is dean of the Italian Concordia Language Village, Lago del Bosco, in northern Minnesota, which also became a book:You're Sending Me Where? He lives in Minneapolis.

"..."The Scooter Bible" is an exhaustively researched treasure of pictures, old advertisements and minutia." -- Bud Wilkinson * Ride-CT / Ride-New England *