Book Review by Rob Ainsley (Disclosure: Rob helped copy-edit the early drafts, but is not otherwise related to Get Cycling)

Image: Jim McGurn
Credit: Jim McGurn, Company of Cyclists

There’s something rather old-fashioned about Cycle Magic, and I mean that as a compliment. In its ambitious near-400 pages it attempts to sum up… well, everything about cycling. The history, from boneshakers to electronic shifting. The infrastructure, from the Netherlands’ bicycle-road system to improvising in Myanmar. The bikes, from town clunkers to HPVs to special-needs models. The fun stuff: bikes on stamps, in cartoons, in philosophical writing, in literature, in travelogues. The breadth is extraordinary, and Jim McGurn is one of the few writers who could dare to tackle something so vast.

Jim will be known to many YCC members; he’s been on the cycling scene for decades. He’s most familiar as the man behind York’s Get Cycling, which enables just about anyone, whatever their physical or mental position, to enjoy riding a bike. In some ways, this is a summary of everything he’s ever worked in, on or around.

Cycle Magic is not a book to read through in a sitting. It’s a dipping-in treasury, profusely illustrated, and hugely inclusive. What other book can claim to cover unicycles, cycling posters, urban bike share schemes, amphibious bikes, the situation in Africa, fixing punctures, Beryl Burton, HG Wells and coffee-making bikes, to pick out just a fraction? Such an encyclopedic scope means it’s probably most relevant to libraries, clubs and institutions than individuals, but serious bike-book collectors will certainly be interested too. I don’t know of anything that can match this for images, in terms of range and depth: over a thousand of them.

So what’s ‘old-fashioned’ about it? This. I got into cycling in the 1970s and 1980s, when there seemed less pigeonholing than now. No MTBs, no hybrids, no ‘road bikes’, no Lycra. Bikes were bikes, and cyclists were, well, cyclists. So cycling books tended then to be all-embracing. And it felt like we shared a vision for a world that would be better the more it went on self-propelled wheels.

Not so now. With the explosion of websites, social media and online video channels, it’s all too easy to find yourself in a silo that deals only with your cycling niche. Road cyclists who would never pedal to the shops; mountain bikers who would never ride on the road; bikepackers who never stray from YouTube; aspiring riders unaware that the barriers to them getting in the saddle (special needs, bad infrastructure, budget) are actually all surmountable… Universal cycling overviews are rare. And that visionary outlook has become a more hard-headed lobbying and campaigning mindset.

So it’s uplifting to see Jim’s colourful and world-wise celebration of all things pedallable. It’s vast, it’s visionary, it’s velo. Pop in to Get Cycling down Hospital Fields Road and browse a copy: you might just come away with one in your bag and a smile on your face.

YCC members can buy the book for a specially discounted £20 from Get Cycling in Hospital Fields Road. Alternatively members can buy it for £20 plus £5 p&p by crediting The Company of Cyclists, account no 20325743, sortcode 821974, and emailing their address to admin@companyofcyclists.co.uk