The Wheelmen's Gazette, Vol 4, No 9
Articles in this issue
- Joseph J. Bliss of San Francisco recalls how, at age thirty-five in May 1887, he first mounted a borrowed 50-inch Columbia Expert in Alameda, California, and went on to ride a 54-inch American Challenge and a New Mail ordinary on century runs around the San Francisco Bay.
- An unsigned essay advises women cyclers on proper dress, recommending all-wool undergarments, plain ankle-length skirts and broad-soled shoes fitted with pedal-grip slits, while criticizing riders whose low saddles and high handlebars bring the sport into disrepute.
- The dateline of the Gazette's regular "Monthly Summary" department, a state-by-state roundup of club runs, road races and tournaments held in the preceding month, including the Southern California Wheelmen's eight-day tour, the Chicago Cycle Club's run from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, and race meets at Hartford, Des Moines, Kansas City and Kingston, Canada.
- A short unsigned poem personifying Memory as "Love's fairest daughter," a statue of unconscious grace standing with bowed, averted face.
- The Gazette's regular listing of new American and English patents touching bicycles and tricycles, compiled by Washington patent attorneys C. A. Snow & Co., covering inventions such as bicycle tights, a self-steering safety bicycle, and a folding or compressed bicycle.
- A books-and-music notes column reporting new cycling sheet music issued by John F. Ellis & Co., the launch of The Cyclists' Companion and The No Name Magazine, an announced Lippincott volume on the origin of the bicycle, and forthcoming Century Magazine fiction by Mark Twain and Frank R. Stockton.
- A calendar of race meets and club tournaments scheduled from September 16 through November 5, 1889, including the Virginia State Division Meet at Norfolk, the Murphy-Van Wagoner 25-mile race on the Irvington-Milburn course, and tournaments at Toronto and Macon, Georgia.
- A report on a novel 22-ton single-rail railway engine newly arrived in New York from Portland, Maine, designed with elevated guide beams so that an ordinary double track could carry "bicycle trains," with trials planned at Gravesend.
- Practical advice "to buyers of second-hand safeties" on testing a used bicycle's wheel bearings, steering neck, spokes and tires for wear, warning that a machine's plating or enamel is no guide to its true age.
- A miscellany column of trade notes and reprinted opinion, reporting S. G. Whittaker's new partnership at the Strong & Green Cycle Co. of Philadelphia, the founding of the Losier & Yost and Stover bicycle companies, and reprinted praise for wheeling's healthful and moral benefits from the Courier Journal and Rev. Chas. Fessenden.
- A signed poem by "Chris Wheeler" in the voice of an unrepentant cycling enthusiast who declares his wheel "is all to me" and invites readers to call him crank and duffer.
- A long essay by Captain Francis V. Greene, reprinted from Harper's Weekly, tracing road-building from the Appian Way through Macadam, Telford and the French engineer Tresaguet to France's national road administration and the comparative merits of stone, asphalt and wood city pavements.
- A Cycle Touring Club member's travelogue of a July 1889 bicycle tour from Dieppe through Gournay, Pontoise, Paris, Versailles, Laon and Hirson to the Belgian frontier, covering some 280 miles of French roads before the party split for Brussels and Namur.
- A fictional tale, told by returning club member "Marion Speed" to fellow wheelmen in a Canadian cycling club, of a ride into the South Florida Everglades near the trading post of Echoconnee that ended with his companion Wales Wynton dragged from his horse and killed by panthers.
- A humorous item about an Eastern bicycle club that, following old New England custom, wrapped its janitor's donation-party gifts in plain brown paper — yielding old boots, bicycle spokes, banana skins and bricks — after which the janitor resigned.
- A whimsical nonsense poem by Charles Alexander Persons, dedicated to novelist Amelie Rives Chanler, imagining a moonlit ride on a "tandem trike" rendered in invented, Jabberwocky-style words.