Bassett's Scrap Book, Vol 10, No 11
Articles in this issue
- The New Year's leader (a banner heading recycled each January) opens with seasonal verse and a letter from old-timer George Chinn, now of White Plains, N.Y., on being knocked down by an auto two months earlier; it then carries an extended Wheel About the Hub debate, with Will R. Pitman lamenting that its spirit is dying out since the Ponkapoag stop was dropped and Quin Kilby arguing the 1892 route should stay unchanged.
- A run of short unheaded items: a meditation on Charles Lamb's essay on New Year's Eve and the passage of time ('the child Elia, that other me'); a one-line dig, reprinted from the Boston Herald, that six-day bicycle races are mercifully less common than they used to be; and a report that a newly launched German society for the reform of male dress wants smocks or blouse suits and knee breeches to replace trousers, shirts, and collars.
- A feature reprinting humorous Christmas-card verses sent to Esstee by League officers including President Kilby (Boston), Vice-Presidents Hale (New York) and Gideon (Philadelphia), Auditor Nash, ex-President Atwater (Bridgeport), and others, with Esstee's replies.
- Odds and ends: an Irish Cyclist item on a cyclist who survives being run over by a motor lorry near Herne Hill; a note that Ocean-to-Ocean Highway subscriptions have passed a million dollars; Pope Manufacturing Co. shareholders voting to reincorporate in Massachusetts; Percy Low's Daily Express complaint about the dangers of cycling after dark; and notice of the Century Road Club of America's 22nd reunion dinner at the Parisian, New York.
- Under the byline 'Scorcher' in the Irish Cyclist, a discursive essay defends the 'arm-chair cyclist' who writes evocatively about the sport rather than merely racking up mileage, invoking Moltke directing the Franco-German war from his study and Napoleon leading without a sword to argue that inspiring words do more for cycling than the scorchers who ride forty or fifty thousand miles a year.
- Preceded by a note that old-timer Belding sent in a photo of himself riding an alligator in Florida, the piece marks the centenary of the trouser, tracing its slow acceptance (banned at Oxford until 1810, Cambridge until 1812, the Duke of Wellington refused entry to Almack's in 1814) and noting how the bicycle nearly drove it out before the auto brought the long bags back.
- Three brief filler quips (on loose spokes, luxury, and dissipating a fortune) precede the formal statement of ownership required under the Act of Congress of Aug. 24, 1912, naming Abbot Bassett as editor, managing editor, business manager and owner of the Newtonville, Mass. monthly (published by the L.A.W. Publishing Co.), sworn before Justice of the Peace Charles A. Drew on October 25, 1912.