[STEARNS BICYCLES.] The Yellow Fellow Year Book. A Treatise upon Stearns Bicycles.

Beardsley Bikes for ‘Yellow Fellows’

[STEARNS BICYCLES.] The Yellow Fellow Year Book. A Treatise upon Stearns Bicycles. Syracuse, New York: E C Stearns & Co. 1896.

4to. Publisher’s yellow and yellow-orange printed wrappers after the design of the Yellow Book, twice-stapled; pp. 47, [1 (blank)]; title-page printed in yellow and black, text within yellow border with black and yellow Art Nouveau typographic ornaments, lithographic illustrations of bicycles throughout, extensive black-and-white reproductions of paintings of cyclists; a very good copy.

A very rare and charming trade catalogue issued by the E.C. Stearns Bicycle Agency in Syracuse, New York, the design of the wrappers playing on Beardsley’s illustrations for The Yellow Book.

Stearns bicycles, with their distinctive yellow frames, were known as ‘Yellow Fellows’. The agency had been established by industrialist Edward Carl Stearns in 1893. By the time this catalogue was published, the company had factories in Syracuse and Toronto as well as branches in Buffalo and San Francisco. E.C. Stearns began issuing the Yellow Fellow in 1894 and produced subsequent issues until c. 1900, all extremely rare.

OCLC finds only three copies for 1896, at Delaware, the Henry Ford, and Syracuse; no copies of the Yellow Fellow Year Book for any year traced on Library Hub.

See Romaine, p. 62 (recording issues for 1894, 1895, and 1897 only); Printer’s Ink 15 (1896), p. 54 (‘One of the handsomest bicycle catalogues that has come to me’).

SKU: 2124732