Last night I finished reading Riding With Rilke, Ted Bishop’s low-key, thoughtful memoir of a road trip across America. So it was perfect timing when a hardback review copy of Motorcycle Dream Garages arrived this morning.
The text and photos are by Lee Klancher, who built a garage bigger than his house in 2004 and ended up writing several books about garages. (Klancher has a lifestyle most of us would dream about, mixing motorcycles, travel journalism and camera gear, and making a living writing books and for magazines.) The seventeen chapters each cover a different garage, from private collections to slightly shabby workshops. On the cover is Roger Goldammer’s outrageous Goldmember custom, but most of the bikes inside the book are older and less ostentatious. My favorite venues are New York’s Rising Wolf Garage, a place for riders to park and wrench on their machines, and on the opposite coast, Yoshi Kosaka’s Garage Company store. As Klancher notes, “Quite often the physical spaces defy logic from a dollars-per-square-foot sense, but they make all kinds of sense in terms of being places to pursue your passion.” Such garages may be out of our league, but you can get a copy of Motorcycle Dream Garages from “all good bookstores”, as they say. Or from Amazon. Highly recommended.