Gunnar Fehlau

The standard book on recumbents, written by one of Germany's best-known cycling journalists. There's not much point in reviewing it, really: as far as I know it is the only actual monograph on the subject, so if you like to ride feet forward, you will end up with this on your shelves sooner or later.

I have the 3rd German edition, from 1996, so it's obviously a bit out of date by now, but it gives a very nice historical account of the creative effort cyclists have invested over the years in finding ever more sophisticated ways to lie back and put their feet up. The story of the Mochet recumbent of the 1930s (often mentioned elsewhere, but rarely discussed in any kind of detail) is particularly interesting, as is the account of underground recumbent building in communist East Germany (if you wanted small wheels, you had to make your own tyres...).

In the more modern part of the book the development of speed records and competition is discussed in quite some detail, whilst other areas - trikes and velomobiles, for instance - get rather short shrift. The focus is on Germany and the USA, so some quite important developments in other places (e.g. the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark) are only mentioned in passing. However, it is in the nature of things that HPVs are a cottage industry, with hundreds of models from small builders in obscure places appearing and disappearing all the time, and it's very difficult for anyone to keep an overview.… (altro)