Competitions and giveaways...

...Win a free book

the book cover

"The Bicycle Clip Diaries is a travel memoir; it starts out in Middlesbrough, where I found an envelope in my Dad’s garage, addressed to me from my Grandad, who has been dead for more than a decade. It contained a pair of Bicycle Clips and a 1937 guide to Japan. I decided to act on this discovery."

I'd love to give away the Bicycle Clip Diaries for free; sadly there are people to pay.

Like printers, editors, and my mortgage lender who isn't in it for the exposure.

One of them is the long suffering designer Ric Marry, who I believe was genuinely surprised at my insistence that each letter in the Bicycle Clip part of the title should be based on a letter from an iconic bicycle brand. I think Ric's unspoken point was that nobody would notice or care.

Attention to detail? Obsessive? Will anyone notice? You decide.

If you can tell me the bicycle brands whose lettering makes up Bicycle Clip, I'll send you a free copy of the book.

Most are British, and there are one or two repetitions. And I'll give you the first one for free: the excellent winged B, comes from BSA, also known as the The Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited, which went out of business in 1973, almost a hundred years after its first bicycle*.

To enter, please email (I'll delete your data) or get in touch via Twitter.

To buy the book, please click here.

The eBook is available on Amazon

Some clues:

1) I and second C: an ancient British Kingdom, on the go as bicycle manufacturers since 1946, and still on the go *please send me a free bike*
2) C and E: fab gear/s?
3) 1980s kids wanted these wheels but only rich kids got high on them.
4) L, second C and I were acceptable in the 80s, and most Brits would probably recognise their Heron.
5) L fab (Italian) gear/s?
6) Favoured by BBC executives, allegedly?

*the wonderful Otto, whose frame pattern never did catch on:

Image source: © Grace's guide, via Creative Commons Licence

BSA Bicycles in the Grace's guide:
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/BSA:_Bicycles

Although much of the action takes place on sensible bicycles in far-flung places, like Shanghai and the Rift Valley, I spent hundreds of hours with old bicycle catalogues in order to understand the history of the bicycle. And getting distracted by them. I learnt to love Grace's Guides.

Support Grace's guide here:
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Support_Grace%27s_Guide

a few of the various incarnations of the BSA logo.

Bio

Nick Raistrick has ridden bicycles on all of the continents with the exception of Antarctica; he's photographed them in Beirut, Baghdad and Bristol; and he's written about them, and other things, for the Guardian, the BBC and Boneshaker magazine.

He has worked as a copywriter, journalist, editor, and producer. He is also a trainer and consultant, specialising on humanitarian media projects, and has worked in Somalia, Syria, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Kashmir, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Moldova, and elsewhere. He has written about gender-based violence for the UN, and wrote the BBC handbook for radio producers in Zambia.

Nick has also taken down tents in France, pulled pints in Middlesbrough, and sold pens in Bromley to make ends meet. He has lived in Prague, Madrid, and Barcelona, but comes from North Yorkshire, and a long line of people with proper, solid jobs, like steel worker and North Sea fisherman.

Nick lives in Brighton with his wife, stepchildren, chaotic toddler and approximately eight bicycles, not all of them his.

For media enquiries, please contact nick.raistrick@me.com