Day 253: Today's Pick — *Velocette: Production Motorcycles 1925-1970*

I am going to recommend, today, an extremely niche book about an extremely niche topic, on the theory that this site exists in part to point at the obscure and confidently say "yes, this is worth your attention."

The book is Velocette: Production Motorcycles 1925-1970, by Roy Bacon. Hardcover, 432 pages, publisher Veloce in the UK, originally published 1986, currently in a 4th edition with photography updates and minor corrections. Used copies in good condition turn up for around $40; the new printing is closer to $60.

What is it about? A small English motorcycle company called Velocette, based in Hall Green, Birmingham, that ran from roughly 1905 to 1971, made about 60,000 motorcycles total over that period (a number that BMW now produces in approximately three weeks), and during their run produced some of the most engineering-elegant single-cylinder motorcycles of the 20th century.

Velocette is, I will confess, the favorite obscure marque of a small subset of British motorcycle nerds, and I will further confess that I am one of them. The company's most famous machines — the KTT racer, the MAC roadster, the Venom 500, the Thruxton 500, the strange and brilliant LE shaft-drive cruiser — are, to my mind, some of the best-designed motorcycles ever to come out of Britain. The Venom 500, in particular, is the bike that holds my affections most strongly, partly because it set, in 1961, the world's first 24-hour speed record at over 100 mph (a single-cylinder air-cooled British single did this; please dwell on it for a moment), and partly because it is the most photographed bike in the Bacon book.

What makes the Bacon book special, beyond the subject matter, is the texture of its writing. Bacon was a British motorcycle journalist of the old school — patient, technical, slightly wry — and he writes about the engineering choices Velocette made over forty-five years with a depth of attention that is rare in motorcycle writing. The book has, by my count, about 280 black-and-white period photographs of bikes in factory conditions, on race courses, in the hands of riders, and in cutaway view. There are reproduced engineering drawings that I have, on at least one occasion, framed and hung. There are timelines for each model. There are lengthy chapters on the company's racing programs, their strange detours into shaft-driven scooters, and the slow decline of British motorcycle manufacturing through the 1960s.

I want to single out three sections that I think justify the book even for the casual reader.

Chapter 4: The KTT. A short chapter on Velocette's first proper racing bike, with full coverage of the bike's three Isle of Man TT wins and the small group of engineers who designed it.

Chapter 9: The Venom and Thruxton. The 500cc single-cylinder roadsters that are Velocette's most beautiful production bikes. Bacon's writing about the Venom is genuinely affectionate; he was clearly in love with the bike, and the prose carries that.

Chapter 12: The LE. A small, weird, water-cooled, hand-shifted, shaft-driven 200cc utility motorcycle that Velocette designed for the British police and that, contrary to all corporate logic, eventually led to the company's bankruptcy. The chapter reads like a small Greek tragedy of British engineering hubris and is, somehow, the best in the book.

Why is this Day 253? Why a niche motorcycle history?

Because there is a category of book — niche-engineering, marque-history, single-subject deep-dive — that is one of the small enduring pleasures of the bookshelf, and Velocette is one of the better examples in the whole motorcycle subcategory. There is a similar book on Brough Superior. There is a similar book on Norton's racing program. There are, of course, the great vintage-car bookshelves dedicated to obscure French marques. The pleasure of reading these books is the pleasure of letting another person's monomania become, briefly, your own.

If you are not at all into motorcycles, this is not the book for you. Skip ahead to Day 254. If you are into motorcycles, even slightly, the Velocette book is a small, dignified hardcover that will earn its place on your shelf and reward an annual rereading.

A note on alternative subjects, in case Velocette is not the right match. Brough Superior: The Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles by Ronald Clark is an equivalently good marque history. Hot Bikes by Mick Walker covers the broader British single-cylinder scene. The Iron Redskin by Harry Sucher is the canonical Indian Motorcycle history. All of these are doing the same thing: turning a small mechanical universe into a 400-page object you can hold.

This has been Day 253. The pick is for a specific reader. If you are that reader, hello.