Be careful what kind of antiques you get hooked on collecting. Jeffrey Conner got his first bicycle headbadge in college, and then became obsessed with collecting them. They are neat little objects, artful, often brightly-colored, curved metal badges that were put on bikes to indicate the maker, but Conner found out that many of them are extremely difficult to research. Still, he’s managed to amass of collection over a thousand, which he’s documented in his book A Cycling Lexicon. He tells us about his efforts to know the history of each headbadge.
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As a lifelong cyclist, Conner is also curious about the bicycle manufacturers behind these badges, though he’s found it is usually impossible to determine what happened to them. “Part of the problem is if I just have a brand name, sometimes they were used by multiple manufacturers—so there might have been somebody in upstate New York and someone in Cleveland naming their bikes the same thing,” Conner says. “College names like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton were very popular for badges, as were names referencing strength, so it’s hard to trace them. I don’t even know what country some of them are from.”
Even headbadges with detailed information can lead to dead ends, which sometimes have their own mysterious appeal. “I live near Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I have a badge from Kalamazoo that has an address on it,” Conner explains. “So I went to the address and there’s nothing there now—it’s an empty lot. But the city’s new bike path goes right by it.”
You’ll learn something about the history of bicycle manufacturing as well as headbadge collecting at Collectors Weekly.
Source: neatorama