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The Scooter Bible: The Ultimate History and Encyclopedia
The Scooter Bible is an entertaining, colorful, and authoritative history of the little motorbikes that could.
Beginning with the first motor scooter in 1902, Eric Dregni is your guide to everything from the postwar American scooter boom to the golden age of Italian and European scooters, the rise of Mod scooter culture in England . . . right up to modern electric scooters.
Today, nostalgia for vintage Vespas, Piaggios, Cushmans, Lambrettas, and other top brands drive a new thirst for retro-inspired scooters in showrooms around the world. This revised and updated edition of The Scooter Bible brings the story up to date with the drive for zero emissions via electric vehicles. Throughout, author Eric Dregni offers you a wealth of historic black-and-white photos, evocative period advertisements, manufacturer photos, and more—over 500 images! Along the way, he also shows you scooter evolution, changing technologies, and scooter appearances in popular culture.
And as the most comprehensive scooter book ever, The Scooter Bible also includes the world’s most exhaustive encyclopedia of scooter brands, from Puddlejumper to Piaggio, Ducati to Doodlebug, and Zündapp Bella to Genuine Stella. The Scooter Bible is all you need before kick-starting your scooter engine to life and praying for ever more speed.
Indeed, scooters are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturized monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas (the stranger the better). They are the weird and the wonderful. And they are all here in The Scooter Bible.
Beginning with the first motor scooter in 1902, Eric Dregni is your guide to everything from the postwar American scooter boom to the golden age of Italian and European scooters, the rise of Mod scooter culture in England . . . right up to modern electric scooters.
Today, nostalgia for vintage Vespas, Piaggios, Cushmans, Lambrettas, and other top brands drive a new thirst for retro-inspired scooters in showrooms around the world. This revised and updated edition of The Scooter Bible brings the story up to date with the drive for zero emissions via electric vehicles. Throughout, author Eric Dregni offers you a wealth of historic black-and-white photos, evocative period advertisements, manufacturer photos, and more—over 500 images! Along the way, he also shows you scooter evolution, changing technologies, and scooter appearances in popular culture.
And as the most comprehensive scooter book ever, The Scooter Bible also includes the world’s most exhaustive encyclopedia of scooter brands, from Puddlejumper to Piaggio, Ducati to Doodlebug, and Zündapp Bella to Genuine Stella. The Scooter Bible is all you need before kick-starting your scooter engine to life and praying for ever more speed.
Indeed, scooters are mechanical marvels on two wheels. Streamlined spuds. Mutant oddballs of Jet Age styling gone berserk. Innovative inventions shoehorned like sardines into miniaturized monocoque bodies. Engineering and styling enigmas (the stranger the better). They are the weird and the wonderful. And they are all here in The Scooter Bible.
- GenresNonfiction
1103 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 21, 2022
5 people want to read
About the author
Eric Dregni
25 books43 followersEric Dregni has written nine books including Midwest Marvels, The Scooter Bible, Ads that Put America on Wheels, and Grazie a Dio non Sono Bolognese. As a 2004 Fulbright Fellow to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Eric researched Scandinavian culture and roots for a forthcoming book. His time is divided between Italy, Norway, and Minneapolis where he is the curator for El Dorado Conquistador Museum and guitarist for the mock-rock trio Vinnie & the Stardüsters.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 24, 2022
This was a timed advance review copy, and given the content, I almost did not have hopes of working my way through the entire thing. I ended up managing to read it all, but it is an encyclopedia, and therefore it is full of data that I obviously cannot retain in my head for other people.
I also did not expect to find it as fascinating as I did. One of the main reasons comes with its own backstory. As I was finishing up with school (probably the last time that I paid as much attention to Indian television advertisements (usually a lot of them are quite emotionally good)), I saw an ad for a new model of a scooter that was completely targetted at women/girls. It was an utterly overt attempt, and I felt mildly insulted, having driven bulkier models with the same amount of comfort. When I started going through this journey from the beginning of the industry, it turned out that that was always the norm and not the exception. Scooters' ads were almost always targeted at women! This book starts at the beginning and gives us everything we would ever need to know about the industry, including the engine details.
Some of the dangers of the older models were almost hilarious. The author also provides very good insight into how the industry grew and morphed and how and where the design and manufacture occurred. Along with the pictures of the models (sometimes actual scooters preserved by people), the author gave the backstory, the possible things that it triggered and the advertisements that ran for that model. It helped show how the world changed.
I went into the book expecting to come out with a brief understanding of the scooter industry. Instead, I got more than that; I could imagine the way the world and its people changed in the last century.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is based on my own reading experience.
I also did not expect to find it as fascinating as I did. One of the main reasons comes with its own backstory. As I was finishing up with school (probably the last time that I paid as much attention to Indian television advertisements (usually a lot of them are quite emotionally good)), I saw an ad for a new model of a scooter that was completely targetted at women/girls. It was an utterly overt attempt, and I felt mildly insulted, having driven bulkier models with the same amount of comfort. When I started going through this journey from the beginning of the industry, it turned out that that was always the norm and not the exception. Scooters' ads were almost always targeted at women! This book starts at the beginning and gives us everything we would ever need to know about the industry, including the engine details.
Some of the dangers of the older models were almost hilarious. The author also provides very good insight into how the industry grew and morphed and how and where the design and manufacture occurred. Along with the pictures of the models (sometimes actual scooters preserved by people), the author gave the backstory, the possible things that it triggered and the advertisements that ran for that model. It helped show how the world changed.
I went into the book expecting to come out with a brief understanding of the scooter industry. Instead, I got more than that; I could imagine the way the world and its people changed in the last century.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is based on my own reading experience.
June 13, 2022
The Scooter Bible by Eric Dregni is everything one could hope for in one book: nice history, excellent illustrations, and a great encyclopedia.
My experience with scooters is fairly limited but I have had a fondness for them from many of the films I watched and eventually studied. This book more than answered all of my questions and I absolutely loved all of the pictures of older advertisements.
This will also serve as a great resource, the encyclopedia part of the book is handy and far more thorough than I expected. In some ways, the first half(ish) of the book is for reading while the second is for reference, though I found myself going from skimming it to reading most of the entries. And yes, I was that nerd growing up that used to take one of the Encyclopedia Britannica volumes to my room to read.
Whether you have owned and loved scooters or you're more interested in their history for other reasons, you will find a lot here to enjoy and will come away with a new or renewed love of them.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
My experience with scooters is fairly limited but I have had a fondness for them from many of the films I watched and eventually studied. This book more than answered all of my questions and I absolutely loved all of the pictures of older advertisements.
This will also serve as a great resource, the encyclopedia part of the book is handy and far more thorough than I expected. In some ways, the first half(ish) of the book is for reading while the second is for reference, though I found myself going from skimming it to reading most of the entries. And yes, I was that nerd growing up that used to take one of the Encyclopedia Britannica volumes to my room to read.
Whether you have owned and loved scooters or you're more interested in their history for other reasons, you will find a lot here to enjoy and will come away with a new or renewed love of them.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
July 12, 2025
Lot of history & great photos! Found it in Half-Price bookstore, marked down from $40 to$14.50 was a fun read, even if a little repetitive. Company starts making scooters, lasts a few years, goes out of business. The ads & pictures used told a great story
December 29, 2024
Great topic, poor writing. This book needed a lot more editing; there were typos on almost every page. The copy was repetitive; the same information would appear in the chronological section in the main body, then repeated in an image caption on the same page, then a third time in the encyclopedia section, and finally a fourth time in THAT section’s photograph caption. The content was also extremely boring. Paragraph upon paragraph of senseless and contextless engine sizes, horsepower statistics, and descriptions of body shape with no accompanying photograph. The only reason it has 4 stars is because it gets a bonus star for subject matter.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews