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queens of pain - legends and rebels of cycling. isabel best. bluetrain publishing/rapha editions softback. 240pp illus. £25

when my younger brother and i were mere teenagers, i managed to convince him, for no particular reason, that there was such a thing as a left-handed piano. it's the sort of annoying practical joke that is easy to believe; if paul mccartney, a noted south-paw, played a left-handed hofner violin bass guitar, would it not, tautologically speaking, make perfect sense that the same principles would apply to keyboards? of course, as far as i'm aware, there are no commercially available versions of this non-existent instrument, in much the same way that your local music store probably stocks very few, if any, left-handed guitars.

left-handed individuals are very much in the minority and in the past, it was a natural predilection that was actively discouraged. i know of several acquaintances for whom the act of learning to write was a great deal harder than for the rest of us, because of a teacher who simply wouldn't hear of such a thing. big business - in this case, fender, gibson, steinway, bosendorfer, et al - cater predominantly to the majority and their stockists do likewise. but that is surely not a situation that pertains to humanity as a whole? though i have not looked closely at any world population statistics, it seems not an unnatural assumption to figure that around 50% of the world is male and the other 50% female. give or take. yet the popularity of many an activity, sporting or otherwise, would seem to disavow the casual observer as to the veracity of my assumption.

for instance, i note that women in formula one motor-racing, until recently, seemed confined to standing glamorously alongside the motor cars, sheilding the drivers from the sun or rain. and even our own professional level cycling insists that the winner of any given stage of any race you care to mention is kissed on the cheeks by one or two podium girls. and far be it for me to admit to taking any pertinent notice of the golf world, but i'm unaware of copious television coverage of the women's game. again, until recently, there were a number of golf clubs that banned women from the often sumptuous facilities provided for the apparently 'superior' male golfers.

i know that, in the western world at least, this attitude towards women is in the process of change; things probably aren't as bad or as discriminatory as was once the case, but to use the word 'equality' still remains a bit of a misnomer. which is why this latest publication from bluetrain publishing/rapha editions, written by isabel best, is one that should be welcomed with open arms.

the title, 'queens of pain' is a reference to a 2014 publication from rapha, entitled 'kings of pain', one that featured many of the greats drawn from cycle racing's rich heritage, including fausto coppi, jacques anquetil, gino bartali etc. however, though cycle sport is notoriously dominated by the male of the species, isabel best has partially, yet effectively, redressed the balance by featuring two dozen riders the majority of which you will likely never have heard of. and if we assume that the greats of the male side of the equation had a hard life as 'convicts of the road', women who felt the compulsion to ride bicycles very fast, arguably had a far harder time of it.

"They would ride for 100 miles to take part in a 10-mile time trial and work 12-hour days, six days a week, travel on night trains so they could race on Sundays, then get the sleeper back for work on Monday morning."

the existence and persistence of the women included in 'queens of pain' is very much at odds with the 'expected' behaviour of the fairer sex. far more common would have been sewing bees, charity work, church coffee mornings and the like; what society expected and most often, what society got. dressing skimpily in shorts and jersey to ride a bicycle was most certainly frowned upon in certain 'respectable' quarters. yet even in the late 19th century, not long after the birth of the safety bicycle, a swedish girl then living in chicago, was able to make her mark on that particular corner of american society and stand out amongst her peers.

"Tillie (Anderson) not only stopped crashing, but improved with each day of practice [...] She went on to win the entire Six-day race. [...] That year she took part in eight Six-day races and won all but one."

the author has compiled an impressive coterie of female riders, illustrating the tenacity of many in the face of what could legitimately be described as adversity. there are the well-known riders such as alfonsina strada, eileen sheridan, beryl burton, connie carpenter-phinney and jeannie longo, but no less worthy are the hitherto unknowns: helene dutrieux, evelyn hamilton, margeurite wilson, valda unthank and many others. best should be praised not only for her research into the lives of these women cyclists, but for narratives that are every bit as compulsive as the tenacity of her subjects. her style does her and them, proud.

"There's a certain classic photograph of a racing cyclist from the 1920s. It is raining and the rider wears a mud-caked woollen jersey and shorts. A thousand yard stare issues from a face worn with the indescribable effort of a race just completed. [...] Our picture was taken... of a woman, the French Champion Suzanne Hudry. But that's probably all we'll ever know of her."

it is well that the author makes mention of a photograph, for the reproduction of those in the book is more than worthy of special mention. given that the majority are from the days prior to the advent of colour photography, in another, less adventurous publication, these would have been faithfully reproduced in monochrome. however, the editors at blue train eschewed such conventions, choosing not only to have the images printed with spot inks, as opposed to the more usual process colours, but the entire publication, including text, is devoid of black. several of the images, aside from the imposition of an attractive line-screen, have been subjected to the overprinting of a second colour atop the first.

according to blue train's, guy andrews, "The whole job was printed with five colours. There is no CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black (key)) as we replaced them all with a spot colour, which is why the text is blue. There's no black either. Any overprinting then became a bit of a lottery. We had some ideas as to what would happen, but it was a bit suck it and see. It also made the images a bit more fun and kept a consistency through the book. Some of the (image) quality was variable as it spans around 100 years of racing.
"Our printers enjoyed it too, although it took them a day to clean the presses so they could get back to the next job."

treating the imagery in such a manner could be seen as somewhat trivial or superficial, but in my opinion, so doing has raised the book's presence to that of a desirable and treasurable object. allied with isabel best's praiseworthy endeavours, it makes 'queen's of pain' a publication that you ignore at your peril.

a book that will be deservedly talked about for many a long year.

queens of pain is released on friday 19 october

thursday 18 october 2018