Bicycle Season

Not everything I buy at auction is destined for resale--at least not right away. I am still a collector, in my way, and one of the things I often find myself attracted to is vintage folk art. And if there's some component to it that has to do with books or writing, I find it doubly hard to resist. 

Last week, at the one auction I regularly attend, I was able to get a small box of folky items, including a small, crudely carved wooden chain, and some other wooden items, but the real gems, as far as I was concerned, were a pair of folk-art bicycles.

They are made, as I expect the images show, from recycled old office supplies: the wheels are made from typewriter erasers (with the brushes removed); the bicycle frames (and the cyclist's head) are made from old brass binding rivets; and the limbs of the cyclist are bent paperclips. The corks that make the hats, I suppose, aren't really office supplies at all.

The bicycle with the black wheels, I think, is the older of the two; probably it was the model that the later example was based on. It seems to me to be a bit more handily made and attractive.

I can't really picture either of these being made any more recently than the 1950s or 1960s. I probably last used a typewriter eraser in the 1980s, and I don't think I ever really had a ready supply of brass binding rivets. I suppose both are obsolete technologies, now, but I think that's part of these bicyclists' charm.