On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

I recently received as a generous gift the Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicycles by Jan Heine with photography by Jean-Pierre Praderes. Jan is the editor of Bicycle Quarterly , to which I've recently subscribed, and Jean-Pierre clearly has a real talent for photography. The two combine to put together an incredible book. This book only reinforces the impression I'd already gotten from Jan's writing in Bicycle Quarterly : that randonneur bikes, rather than being the over-weight, poorly handling, sluggish beasts I'd always assumed, are actually fairly competitive machines which are actually far better suited to the sort of riding that most avid cyclists do than the typical racing bike sold in the vast majority of high-end shops in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere else I've seen high-end shops. And the bikes described in this book are nothing short of high-end. The Technical Trials which became popular in France in from the 1930's until World...