The Scooter Bible: The Ultimate History and Encyclopedia

by Eric Dregni

Overview

The Scooter Bible is an entertaining, colorful, and authoritative history of the little motorbikes that could.

Beginning with the first motor scooter in 1902, Eric Dregni is your guide to everything from the postwar American scooter boom to the golden age of Italian and European scooters, the rise of Mod scooter culture in England . . . right up to modern electric scooters.

Today, nostalgia for vintage Vespas, Piaggios, Cushmans, Lambrettas, and other top brands drive a new thirst for retro-inspired scooters in showrooms around the world. This revised and updated edition of The Scooter Bible brings the story up to date with the drive for zero emissions via electric vehicles. Throughout, author Eric Dregni offers you a wealth of imagery: historic black-and-white photos, evocative period advertisements, manufacturer photos, and more—over 500 images! Along the way, he also shows you scooter evolution, changing technologies, and scooter appearances in popular culture.

And as the most comprehensive scooter book ever, The Scooter Bible also includes the world’s most exhaustive encyclopedia of scooter brands, from Puddlejumper to Piaggio, Ducati to Doodlebug, and Zündapp Bella to Genuine Stella. The Scooter Bible is all you need before kick-starting your scooter engine to life and praying for ever more speed.

Indeed, scooters are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturized monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas (the stranger the better). They are the weird and the wonderful. And they are all here in The Scooter Bible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780760375570
Publisher:	Motorbooks
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	51 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Eric Dregni is professor of English, journalism, and Italian at Concordia University in St. Paul. His obsessions range from motor scooters, about which he has authored and co-authored five books, to futuristic jet packs to oversized fiberglass town monuments to Zamboni ice resurfacers. He’s turned his fixations into twenty books including Impossible Road Trip, Let’s Go Fishing, Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of our Fantastic Future, Weird Minnesota, Midwest Marvels, Ads That Put America on Wheels, and Let’s Go Bowling! Dregni worked in Italy for five years as a travel journalist and wrote about the experience in Never Trust a Thin Cook. In the summer, he is dean of the Italian Concordia Language Village, Lago del Bosco, in northern Minnesota, which also became a book:You’re Sending Me Where? He lives in Minneapolis.

Eric Dregni is professor of English, journalism, and Italian at Concordia University in St. Paul. His obsessions range from motor scooters, about which he has authored and co-authored five books, to futuristic jet packs to oversized fiberglass town monuments to Zamboni ice resurfacers. He's turned his fixations into twenty books including Impossible Road Trip, Let's Go Fishing, Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of our Fantastic Future, Weird Minnesota, Midwest Marvels, Ads That Put America on Wheels, and Let's Go Bowling! Dregni worked in Italy for five years as a travel journalist and wrote about the experience in Never Trust a Thin Cook. In the summer, he is dean of the Italian Concordia Language Village, Lago del Bosco, in northern Minnesota, which also became a book:You're Sending Me Where? He lives in Minneapolis.

Table of Contents

Foreword 7

Introduction: Mondo Scooter 9

1 The Pioneer Motorscooters 1902-1930 13

2 The Great American Scooter Craze 1935-1940 23

3 Military Motorscooters 1939-1945 45

4 The Golden Age of the Motorscooter 1946-1954 51

5 Mass Mobilization 1955-1960 93

6 The Mod Years 1960-1975 129

7 The DIY Years 1976-2000 147

8 A New Millennium 2001-On 161

Scooter Encyclopedia A-Z 176

Acknowledgments 316

About the Author 316

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

"...“The Scooter Bible” is an exhaustively researched treasure of pictures, old advertisements and minutia."—Bud Wilkinson, Ride-CT / Ride-New England

"By any measure this is a LOT of book...it is an irresistible proposition."—SpeedReaders.info

From the Publisher