Two-wheel snobbery

Eben Weiss, a.k.a. BikeSnobNYC, writes a bicycle-based blog of the same name, and now has a book based on that blog: Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling. He incorporates a bit of the history of the bicycle with personal anecdotes, photos of “approved” and “disapproved” bikes, and comparisons of different kinds of cyclists (including pitting them against each other). The tone is often—self-admittedly—pessimistic (he is a “snob,” after all), but the illustrations by Christopher Koelle throughout the book steal the show. Because of its appealing packaging and relatively fluffy content, it seems like one of those books Urban Outfitters would sell to trendy hipsters (I checked: They do!), even though the Snob relishes in taking several pages to slam hipsters and their behaviors, even beyond cycling. No worries; the trendy demographic will likely buy it anyway, you know, to be ironic.