Major Taylor: champion undermined by prejudice

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Permalink Reply by clp on February 9, 2019 at 1:36pm

Interesting film Bob.   Thanks.   I wonder how Major Taylor first became interested in bikes.  His autobiography is available for over $200 on Amazon.  But there are a lot of other books on him available much cheaper.

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Permalink Reply by Marco Verzocchi on February 10, 2019 at 9:04am

Actually the book that you find on Amazon at a crazy price seems to be an abridged version of the original book. If you make a search on google you can find a publisher in India that will print on demand the original book (but the quality of that depends on how good the scanning is), and then later you can find the entire original book (1928+75=2003, the copyright has expired) available for free as E-book:  https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fastest_Bicycle_Rider_in_t...

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Permalink Reply by Mike Schwab on February 11, 2019 at 3:01am

His father worked in a bike shop in Indianapolis while he was a kid.  They made him a military style uniform and he performed tricks on his bicycle out front, so they started calling him Major Taylor.

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Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on February 11, 2019 at 2:56pm

I was very glad that NYT ran that piece.

BTW, if you're not able to find a reasonably priced copy of his autobiography for sale, you can find it at Chicago Public Library.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Reho on February 11, 2019 at 8:27pm

Only if you want to read the whole thing at the library!  Must be a rare and valuable book.

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