I found a total score today at work. Because of the isolated location of our building and the reluctance of our cheap company to put up security cams people dump garbage outside our warehouse all the time, and usually it's a pain in the butt cleaning it all up. But today while i was picking it up i saw a few pics of bikes on these 5"x5" index style cards, first a few.. then a few more scattered around, then i hit the jackpot, two full boxes of them!
It turns out it's a complete set of 1760+ cards that were made in the early 90's by Atlas Editions. I googled them and the set was printed between 1992 and 1995 and are long out of print and can't be bought anymore (other than sites like Ebay)
The collection is amazing! it has bikes from every manufacturer that existed from the beginning of motorcycles up to 1995, all sorted by category and country. The front of each card has a photo, and the back has details about the bikes and their histories.
Anyway since this collection is no longer printed and is very hard to find i thought i would scan them all to share them. Can't be a problem with copyright since i'm going to post them free and since they are not sold commercially anymore anyway.
I'm going to scan each card in 300dpi, front and back, then join the two together, so that each bikes card is viewable as one piece on a widescreen monitor. It's going to take quite a while obviously, probably be a several weeks long task whenever i have free time. But when finished it's going to be really cool. I am going to sort all the scans into countries/categories and put them into folders. Then rar up the entire collection and post it on file hosting sites for all to grab.
Here are some pics of the boxes, and all the cards i have to scan.. as well as a few i already did to show the quality of the cards. There are some unbelievable bikes in there. Many that i am sure people have long forgotten. Can't wait to share it when it's all finished
The individual stacks in the pics are the piles i have sorted by country. There are several huge stacks from the big countries (Japan, Great Britain, US, Germany etc..) and then smaller stacks from several small countries that i had no clue ever built their own bikes. Really cool stuff.
Click thumbnails to enlarge
Here are a couple of the cards put together as to how i plan to do them. I may join them like these first two..
*note how they misspelled the can-am as "cam-am" lol
or should i leave them as separate front and back scans like this. Which way do you guys think is better?
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