Bike books on display at the North Portland Library.
(Photo: Josh Berezin)

If we want the next generation to grow up with a fresh perspective on how we get around, then storytime is a powerful place to start. As a bike geek and dad of three I’m always on the lookout for fun children’s books that show cycling in a positive and fun light, so I was thrilled to hear about the City of Portland’s new “Bike to Books” initiative.

It’s a super-smart way to encourage more neighborhood biking and reading among kids.

Bike to Books is part of PDX Bike Month. Also in on the deal is Multnomah Country Library and Metro.

Here’s what they’ve put together: Everyone who bikes to the library will get a free bike light courtesy of Metro; PBOT’s marketing team will give out free bike maps and share family biking info; and the libraries will offer 18 bike-themed storytime sessions at branches throughout the city.
[Read more…]

If you’ve lived in Portland long enough you’ve probably caught site of someone on a bike hauling yard and home improvement tools around. We have organizations that plant trees by bike, businesses that do landscaping and carpentry by bike, and we even have farmers who’ve replaced the iconic work-truck with a work-bike.

One of those farmers, Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, has now written a book about it. Adventures in Urban Bike Farming from Macska Moksha Press is what Sonnenblume calls, “Equal parts historical document, confessional memoir and social critique.”

Don’t let the title of the book fool you, based on an excerpt made available by the publisher Sonnenblume has just as many insights to share about Portland’s cultural upheaval in the past decade as he does about how to increase potato yields. “If you’re looking for a message of ‘rah rah, look how sustainable we are!’,” he says, “you won’t find it here.”[Read more…]

Elly Blue, on the job in 2013.
(Photos: J.Maus/BikePortland)

One of the power couples of Portland biking has decided to formally join forces professionally, too.

Elly Blue, creator of the Taking the Lane zine about feminism and biking and the author or publisher of several other bike-themed books, announced this week that she’s merged her living-room operation Elly Blue Publishing with Microcosm Publishing, the Portland-based independent publisher founded and managed for years by her partner Joe Biel.

[Read more…]

Street Books founder Laura Maulton talks last week with patrons Jonathan and Bam.

After four summers loaded with all the paperbacks you can fit on a cargo trike, Portland’s most public library is rolling merrily forward.
[Read more…]

Todd Roll in February with his fleet of tour bikes.
(Photos courtesy Pedal Bike Tours.)

Todd Roll of downtown-based Pedal Bike Tours has had a big spring.

Last month, his company — maybe best known to Portlanders as the one behind downtown’s “America’s Bicycle Capital” mural — expanded to Honolulu. And next month, his first book is coming out from Timber Press: Pedal Portland, a compilation of 25 easy city bike rides informed by his company’s experience renting out bikes and leading local tours.

[Read more…]

A book its publisher describes as, “Part travelogue, part memoir, part romance, part paean to the bicycle as a simple mode of both mobility and self-expression” will be featured at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland tonight. The author is Bruce Weber, a man who has written words for a living as a writer and reporter for the New York Times since 1986.

There are dozens of books about trans-continental bike rides; and many of them are, how should we say, forgettable. But when a writer with Weber’s skill and C.V. makes the journey and devotes 336 pages to his experience, it’s definitely worth paying attention. Weber’s just-released, Life is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America has already earned critical acclaim and it’s likely to become a favorite of bicycle book lovers.

Here’s more the publisher:[Read more…]

Right off the Williams Avenue bicycle highway.
(Photo by J. Maus/BikePortland)

The local bike-friendly bookstore that also happens to be one of the country’s largest zine distributors and publishers has grown again and joined the row of bike-friendly businesses on North Williams.

“Once we built lofts in our storefront to store books under, and filled up a storage unit down the street, we knew it was time to get serious about finding a new building,” Microcosm Publishing spokesman Tim Wheeler wrote in an email Monday. “Since we’re bike commuters and our customers are bike commuters, we didn’t want to move hundreds of blocks outside the city center or away from our own homes and lives, so we narrowed our search to affordable commercial spaces in inner Portland.”

[Read more…]

Cover of Bikenomics

As she writes in her new book Bikenomics, Portland-based bike writer Elly Blue backed into bike activism in her mid-20s, when she realized that bikes advanced so many of her other wishes for the country.

Almost a decade later, Blue has organized years of observations about the economic benefits of biking into a 194-page book of deeply rational arguments that’s poised to make a splash. It’s studded with stories from her reporting around the United States and anecdotes from her own life and work. Yesterday I talked to Blue, 35 (founder of Elly Blue Publishing, a columnist for Bicycling.com, self-publisher of the quarterly zine Taking the Lane and a former managing editor here at BikePortland), in an email conversation about the country’s most underrated biking city, one of her frustrations with this very blog, and that one time she finally learned to drive.

You’re the queen of bike statistics. Pick your favorite.[Read more…]

Portland is rich with locally written bike books.
(Photo by J.Maus/BikePortland)

Portland has been exporting its biking expertise for years, but the explosion of independent publishing is helping that happen faster than ever.

Case in point: Four new books by young local authors, all currently in development, poised to document and spread local bike wisdom around the city, the region and the country. One’s about moving by bike, one’s about bike touring, one’s about bike-inspired cooking and one is a popular-audience introduction to the role bikes can play in economic growth.

With the days getting shorter and book season approaching, here’s a cheat sheet on a few projects in the works, and how to get ahold of them.

[Read more…]

Pete Jordan, a former Portland resident who lived in Amsterdam for the past eleven years, has written a book about the experience. In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (Harper Perennial 2013) came out a few days ago and Jordan is back in Portland tonight for a reading.

Here’s more about the book from Powells.com:

“When Pete Jordan arrives in Amsterdam to study how to make America’s cities more bicycle-friendly, he immediately falls in love with the city that already lives life on two wheels. His new bride, Amy Joy, joins Pete, and despite their financial hardships and instability, she eventually finds her own new calling as a bicycle mechanic as Pete discovers the untold history of cycling in Amsterdam.

From its beginnings as an elitist pastime in the 1890s to the street-consuming craze of the 1920s, from the bicycle’s role in a citywide resistance to the Nazi occupation to the White Bikes of the 1960s and the bike fishermen of today, Jordan chronicles the evolution of Amsterdam’s cycling.

Part personal memoir, part history of cycling, part fascinating street-level tour of Amsterdam, In the City of Bikes is the story of a man who loves bikes, in a city that loves bikes.”

[Read more…]