I've just put some of these on Ebay, item number 7165003361. They have a Buy-It-Now price of £9.99. All proceeds go to charity-my divorce solicitor. Please help me become solvent! Thanks!!
Bruce Robbins Dundee Scotland
Here's the blurb that goes along with the sale:
This CD contains everything you've ever wanted to know about cycling components from the 1950s. Brown Brothers were the biggest cycling wholesalers in the UK and carried a massive range of goods. Their annual catalogue was a work of art running to hundreds of pages and covering just about every part you could fit to a bike at the time. The 1952 catalogue had more than 270 cycling-related pages in it and they have all been photographed and copied onto this CD. It's hard to know where to begin listing the range of components on the CD but here's a flavour:
Brooks, Simplex, Huret, Sturmey Archer, Harden, British Hub (Airlite and Solite), Dunlop, Mansfield, Williams, Chater Lea, GB, Reynolds, Resilion, Blumfield (Duralite), Cyclo, Brampton and Bluemel.
That's just a small selection of the hundreds of manufacturers listed on the CD. Each page contains information about a particular component, often illustrated with a drawing. It's easy to date equipment and check specifications and even identify parts in your own collection about which you know very little.
Many of these components were used on the great classic British bicycles such as Hetchins, Bates, Claud Butler, Ephgrave, Flying Scot, Carlton, BSA, Gillott, Selbach, Hobbs, Raleigh, Rotrax, Rudge, etc. French bikes including Rene Herse, Alex Singer, Peugeot, Mercier, Bertin, Urago and Rochet also used some of the parts listed.
Original Brown Brothers catalogues sell for anything between £20 and £60 depending on condition and year of publication. However, old catalogues are often fragile and difficult to look up without gradually destroying them. This CD has all of the information in a format that can be viewed over and over again. It's also half the price of the cheapest Brown Brothers catalogue! The photographs of the pages are large files of more than 4mb and can be printed out for easy reference.