Association of British Cycling Coaches

The Golden Years – Heroes of the Postwar Era, 1946 – 1967 . Velo Press 2006. Text by Owen Mulholland. 222 pages hardback, £28. ISBN 978-1-931382-87-8.

Brett and Shelly Horton are American collectors of cycling memorabilia: jerseys, goggles, placards, postcards, posters, little models of Tour de France broom wagons and cyclists, board games (le ‘Jeu du Veldiv'), programmes, musettes, sashes, flags, bicycles and above all, photographs. They have, apparently, 15,000 objects and 170,000 photographs and a firm belief that their talent for collecting matches any other kind of talent in the world. They asked Eddy Merckx, ‘Why are you allowing us to have these jerseys?' and he replied ‘You're the first to offer to pay real money for them.' And that says everything that needs to be said about the great talent of collecting. Americans will pay anything for a piece of history.

Having got that out of the way, I must point out that as an artefact in itself this book possibly deserves the epithet ‘magnificent'. It is beautifully produced, printed on best-quality paper in an attractive typeface, stitched and bound in solid covers. The photos are equally fine, and I've seen very few of them before. My favourite is the one of Koblet getting a bottle on the Izoard, but they're all good. The objects are interesting as markers of the social significance of cycle sport in Europe – Giro d'Italia watches wouldn't have aroused a flicker in the USA or Britain. And jerseys? Well, a jersey is a jersey is a jersey is a jersey, as Gertrude Stein never said.

The book is built on accounts, mostly very brief, of the careers of 40 European riders. Robinson, Simpson and Hoban represent Britain. It's arranged in three sections, divided quite arbitrarily. Why separate Poulidor from Anquetil, Stablinski from Van Looy? The riders are obviously a matter of personal choice, so there are no trackies except Peter Post – nor any of the great amateurs of the period. Each of us could add his own: Van Est, Adriaenssens, Wagtmans, Elliott, Hassenforder, Pingeon and so on, all as deserving of inclusion as Impanis, Zaaf, Grazyck or Beheyt.

The text is by Owen Mulholland, ‘cycling's scribe and storyteller for more than thirty years'. Really? Much of the clunky, cliché-ridden prose reads like a translation from Dutch by someone whose native language isn't English. Some of the accounts are reasonably detailed, others are sketchy to the point of pointlessness. The dust jacket claims the book is painstakingly researched: if it had been, they might have found out that Brian Robinson's first ride in the 1955 Tour de France was as a member of the first-ever British team and not Luxembourg; that the 1954 Circuit des Six Provinces did not cross the Galibier; that blood doping is not a process of ‘spinning down', whatever that might mean; that Bobet reached the foot of the Izoard in 1953 alone – there weren't 40 men on his wheel; that Tom Simpson's wife was English, not Belgian; that Belgium is the country, Belgian the adjective; that the ‘two others' in the key break in the 1958 World's were Voorting and Nencini; that Koblet failed to catch Coppi at Briançon in 1951 not because he was Mr Nice Guy, but because he punctured. And so on. And it would be nice if a few more of the people in the photos were identified. Not my idea of ‘painstaking' – for that you have to take pains. Fortunately collecting is relatively painless – you just hand over money – and it's a fine collection of pictures in a beautiful book.