Brown Brothers 1952 CD £10
Brown Brothers 1939 CD £10
Plus postage
To order, please email me. I accept PayPal (sent as a "personal gift") and cheques drawn on a UK bank or international money orders in GBP.
These CDs contain everything you've ever wanted to know about cycling components from the 1930s and 1950s.
Brown Brothers were the biggest cycling wholesalers in the UK and carried a massive range of goods. Their annual catalogue was a work of art running to hundreds of pages and covering just about every part you could fit to a bike at the time. These pages have all been photographed and copied onto a CD.
It's hard to know where to begin listing the range of components on the CDs but here's a flavour: Brooks, Simplex, Huret, Sturmey Archer, Harden, British Hub (Airlite and Solite), Dunlop, Mansfield, Williams, Chater Lea, GB, Reynolds, Resilion, Blumfield (Duralite), Cyclo, Brampton and Bluemel. That's just a small selection of the hundreds of manufacturers listed on the CD.
Each page contains information about a particular component, often illustrated with a drawing. It's easy to date equipment and check specifications and even identify parts in your own collection about which you know very little. Many of these components were used on the great classic British bicycles such as Hetchins, Bates, Claud Butler, Ephgrave, Flying Scot, Carlton, BSA, Gillott, Selbach, Hobbs, Raleigh, Rotrax, Rudge, etc. French bikes including Rene Herse, Alex Singer, Peugeot, Mercier, Bertin, Urago and Rochet also used some of the parts listed.
Original Brown Brothers catalogues sell for anything between £20 and £60 depending on condition and year of publication. However, old catalogues are often fragile and difficult to look up without gradually destroying them. This CD has all of the information in a format that can be viewed over and over again. It's also half the price of the cheapest Brown Brothers catalogue! The photographs of the pages are large files of more than 4mb and can be printed out for easy reference.
Some sample pages (click for larger images):
