With books such as “Lanterne Rouge” and “Higher Calling,” there is no doubting the writing passion of Max Leonard and his transgenerational vision of cycling, with an empathetic stance toward riders at the back of the peloton. Beyond the hours he spends in the saddle, his experience as a true Londoner is also influenced by the golden age of British cycling: the fixed-gear bikes of the 2000s, the London Olympics of 2012, the rise of Team Sky and, finally, the Rapha phenomenon, which Leonard experienced firsthand as a writer and travel guide.
These experiences in the space of 15 years have transformed the way he views urban commuting, pro racing and cycling as a form of escapism. It’s in keeping with the latter, strangely linked to the British tradition of exploration, that Leonard created Isola Press to publish his discoveries. From strange abandoned bunkers in the South of France to the adventures of the Rough Stuff Fellowship, by way of colorful biographies—including his book on the late Jobst Brand and an upcoming one on Tom Ritchey—Isola Press books are true explorations of the past with a strangely modern resonance, a condensation of the small stories that make up the larger one and, above all, a visual feast based on a treasure trove of vintage photographs. All of this (and more) are revealed in a recent interview with Fausto.
What is your cycling background? I didn’t ride “properly” until my early 20s. In 2009, after I did a charity ride from Geneva to Cannes across all the Tour de France’s classic alpine climbs, I realized it was something I wanted at the core of my life. That was also the year of my first book (about track bikes) for a U.K. publisher, and I’ve written a few more since then, about the Tour de France, mountains and city cycling. My last book for a mainstream publisher was about ice!
But back in 2009 with [Great Britain’s success at] the Beijing Olympics, the birth of Team Sky and the London Olympics [on the horizon], the U.K. entered a bike boom—and I was lucky enough to keep writing about bicycles. I worked with companies like Strava and Rapha while I was also writing books, which gave me a lot of freedom, and I spent a good few summers working around the Tour or in the French Alps. I also worked with a travel company on and off, guiding bike tours, mainly in France. I’ve toured a bit—real touring, with panniers!—and I’ve done a lot of gravel riding and bikepacking too, mainly in the Alps. I lived in Nice before the Covid pandemic, one of the best places to ride in the whole world, but I left there with a tendon issue in my leg, which has meant I haven’t cycled so much these past few years; I’ve been hiking and climbing instead. I love cycling, but I also realized that the bicycle is literally a vehicle to get me where I want to be—in the mountains—and there are other ways to do that.
Creating a publishing business is unusual for an author. How and why did you start Isola Press? I’d had a few experiences in mainstream publishing that didn’t sit well with me, and I was feeling a little burned out, but then I got paid unexpectedly for a job that had gone bad, so I thought I’d do something beautiful and gratuitous with the windfall. The result was self-publishing “Bunker Research,” a book about the brutalist World War II bunkers in the southern Alps made with photographer Camille McMillan. I don’t know if I really had any plan for Isola after that. It was sort of an art project, where I could play with words and images and create things I wanted to. But then I was looking for an out-of-print book called “Rough Stuff Cycling in the Alps,” the original guide to what we’d now call gravel riding in the Alps, drawing on over 50 years of exploring. I figured that if I wanted the book, some other people might also, so I sought out the author, Fred Wright, who was in his 80s, and got permission to republish it. That went down well, and it led to the “Rough Stuff Fellowship Archive” books, which led to “Jobst Brandt Ride Bike!” Now, I’m working with Tom Ritchey to put together his memoir of a life pioneering in the bike world.
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