This was published by Collins, Glasgow and London, in 1985. The ISBN is 0-00-447468-6; the price was GBP 3.50, a bit over US $5. It has been out of print since about 1990. I wrote it because there was no book that gave me the information I wanted, and I figured that I couldn't be the only person who needed that information.
It was very well reviewed, but it wasn't a commercial success. Booksellers didn't buy it, presumably because they didn't want nasty, rough, dirty, smelly motorcyclists in their nice clean bookshops, and Collins (hard though it is to believe) made no attempt to sell it into the motorcycle trade. When Frances and I started to do this, off our own bat in late 1986, it sold like hot cakes -- often as much as 10 or 20 books a week, in each outlet, which by bookselling standards is a best seller. We sold it through motorcycle dealers, though the Bristol Motorcycle Training Centre, and through the Mardyke, the leading motorcyclists' pub in Bristol (where we were living at the time).
Then we moved to California in June 1987, so we could no longer deliver 'outers' (10 books at a time) to the outlets we had built up. Collins showed no interest in continuing that approach, and the book was eventually remaindered. I sold the last few copies that I had at ever-increasing prices -- the last one for US $25 in 1991, because there was someone who was so desperate for the information that he was willing to pay that -- and it now enjoys a certain cult status, despite being grievously outdated.
We thought of re-publishing in book form, but it seemed that the Web might be the ideal medium. As we say in A Plea For Fairness, this is part of my livelihood (and Frances's, and Karl's) and it doesn't seem unreasonable to charge for the information, just as we would for a book. Our lifestyle sounds glamorous, and in a way it is, but believe me, it's pretty much on a shoe-string.
I'm not complaining: I chose to live this way, instead of continuing in the law, or teaching, or accountancy, or advertising photography. But without the income from this and other web-sites (we're working on some more ideas), I don't eat, and you don't get the information and (I hope) the pleasure of reading, learning and dreaming with me.
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last updated: 27/10/03
© 2003 Roger W. Hicks