Cyclomania

Elmar Schenkel's essay illuminates the strange relationships between the planet's energetically best vehicle and the world of words; he moves alternately between bikes and densities, between crashes and poetic swings. Many great authors - from Twain and Zola to Tolstoy and Beckett - were inspired by cycling. Women discovered the possibilities of emancipation through the wheel and wrote about it, for example Simone de Beauvoir. Dadaists, surrealists, SF authors, film directors and artists developed the most absurd dimensions of the bicycle. This exciting book also talks about early globetrotters and about women who cycled on the Way of St James or in the Himalayas. Thus a small history of literature and culture is created through the eyes of the bicycle, which resembles glasses anyway - or the mathematical symbol of infinity.