The Scooter Bible: The Ultimate History and Encyclopedia

The Scooter Bible is an entertaining, colorful, and authoritative history of the little motorbikes that could.

Beginning with the first motor scooter in 1902, Eric Dregni is your guide to everything from the postwar American scooter boom to the golden age of Italian and European scooters, the rise of Mod scooter culture in England . . . right up to modern electric scooters.

Today, nostalgia for vintage Vespas, Piaggios, Cushmans, Lambrettas, and other top brands drive a new thirst for retro-inspired scooters in showrooms around the world. This revised and updated edition of The Scooter Bible brings the story up to date with the drive for zero emissions via electric vehicles. Throughout, author Eric Dregni offers you a wealth of imagery: historic black-and-white photos, evocative period advertisements, manufacturer photos, and more--over 500 images! Along the way, he also shows you scooter evolution, changing technologies, and scooter appearances in popular culture.

And as the most comprehensive scooter book ever, The Scooter Bible also includes the world’s most exhaustive encyclopedia of scooter brands, from Puddlejumper to Piaggio, Ducati to Doodlebug, and Zündapp Bella to Genuine Stella. The Scooter Bible is all you need before kick-starting your scooter engine to life and praying for ever more speed.

Indeed, scooters are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturized monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas (the stranger the better). They are the weird and the wonderful. And they are all here in The Scooter Bible.

Eric Dregni is assistant professor of English and journalism at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of several Quarto titles, including Zamboni: The Coolest Machines on Ice, The Scooter Bible, The Life Vespa, and The Impossible Road Trip, as well as In Cod We Trust: In Search of the Norwegian Dream and Vikings in the Attic: In Search of Nordic America, both from the University of Minnesota Press.

Michael Dregni is the author of several books on a variety of esoteric subjects, from Ferraris to hot rods, electric guitars to motor scooters. Past works include The Illustrated Motor Scooter Buyer’s Guideand Scooters!(both with Eric Dregni) and Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, the definitive biography of the influential guitarist Django Reinhardt.