Max Leonard
We sat down for a talk with Max Leonard, the man behind Isola Press. Here’s what he had to say.
Hi Max, who is/are Isola Press?
Isola Press is only me and obviously I work with photographers and designers. I have made books in the past with big publishers like Thames & Hudson, I have contributed to other books and I have written books too. I wanted to do my own thing because I feel, with the big companies, that as the creator of a book you don’t really get rewarded as you’re always somewhere at the bottom of the pile while other people make the decisions. I’ve worked in cycling for 10 years now, so I tend to know my audience and their interests better than the big publishers.
It all started when I was writing a book called Higher Calling, about why cyclists like riding in the mountains. A lot of that was about the Alps and why there are even roads up there. At that time I was living in Nice and when I was riding up the mountains I found all these bunkers very close to the border with Italy. So I started thinking why are there bunkers on the Col de la Bonette, one of the highest roads in Europe? I got completely obsessed by it and started researching like crazy and I got my friend Camille Mc Millan taking pictures, and that ended up as Isola’s first book “Bunker Research”. So that was the first book, but it only became a real company when we wanted to do the 2nd edition of Fred Wright’s “Rough Stuff Cycling In the Alps” book.
How did you come up with the name Isola Press?
Isola means island in Italian, but it’s actually a little village near Nice , in a valley where I spend a lot of time riding . It’s near the bottom of the Col de la Bonette and there’s a lot of bunkers. There’s also a ski station up there, Isola 2000, where there have been legendary Tour De France finishes. It means something personally because it’s my connection to that part of the world, the landscape, the bunkers, were it all started.
Your 2nd book “The Men of Paris-Roubaix”, co-published with Rapha, contains beautiful original photography of some of the early riders of the legendary classics race Paris-Roubaix. The book has original images showing Paris-Roubaix riders on the start line as they contemplate the ordeal ahead, or on the finish line in the flush of victory. There are also some elegant studio portraits, all showing off the aesthetics of these early ‘convicts of the road’. Where did you get this amazing collection of images from?
I lived in France for a while and speak French, so a lot of my cycling knowledge is about France, the tour, the classics. So I spent quite a lot of time at the French National Library in Paris, where they have been digitizing old photos, documents, cycling magazines for years now. They have this amazing archive and somehow I found these pictures online. They have these starting line pictures, where they’re carrying the old tubular tyres around their shoulders, but there’s also these great studio portraits which are super high quality pictures on glass negatives. I think some of these photo-shoots were sponsored by hat makers and clothing companies, so they got these amazing woolen cardigans and hats. Some of the famous guys look like superstars while the nobodies looked more like tramps from “Waiting for Godot” by Beckett. I just thought they were brilliant pictures and I got in touch with Rapha and they decided they could partner with me on it, so we made 1500 of these postcard books.
Isola came to my attention when you started your Kickstarter campaign for the reprint of Fred Wright’s guide on “Rough Stuff Cycling in the Alps”. How did you meet Fred Wright, an adventurer who had been cycling on gravel roads, dirt tracks and footpaths long before gravel bikes and mountain bikes existed?
James of the Torino-Nice Rally lent me a copy of the original book, he talked to Fred years ago and thought about doing another edition so he gave me Fred’s e-mail. Fred’s in his eighties now and lives in a town in Kent where he goes to the library to do his e-mails each day. So we talked through e-mail and agreed to do a 2nd edition and he also let me use his pictures he made with a pocket camera during his trips in the Alps. The book he made originally was printed in a printshop and had plastic binding and I think he printed about 100 copies. On one level this was an amateur book but on another level, it was incredibly professional and as he worked for Cambridge University Press, there was a lot of attention to detail in the book. For most of his live, from the 1970s until the 1990s, he would spend his holidays on the bike in the Alps or the Pyrenees and explore another region each summer. He put all his own experiences in the book, but also the experiences of a guy called Clem Clements, who was part of the Rough Stuff Fellowship. So most of the tracks and paths are still there now, some you can’t ride anymore because they are in National Parks and a lot of what Fred did is now part of the Tour Du Mont Blanc.
Was Fred a member of the Rough Stuff fellowship?
I think Fred wasn’t part of the Rough Stuff Fellowship and always cycled on his own and I don’t think he ever even met Clem Clements who was a lot older. In the 1980s, Clem collected together his own rides and those done by other RSF members, drew maps and printed the info out with a dot matrix printer. So this private version was the first "Rough Stuff Cycling in the Alps", really. He gave it to his friends, but later, working with Fred, these route descriptions became part of Fred’s original book.
How did Fred react on your idea to reprint his book?
Fred didn’t realize that people were interested in what he had done, for him it was in the past. My favorite moment was when Fred came to the launch party in Stanford’s bookshop in London. For me it was nice to show him that there was a community that still wanted to ride those tracks and who valued his knowledge and the work he had done over the years.
For “The Rough-Stuff Fellowship Archive” book you worked together with Mark Hudson, the Rough-Stuff Fellowship Archivist. How did the idea for a book grew and how did you guys select the images for the book?
I contacted the Rough Stuff Fellowship when I was making Fred’s book because it included routes of some of their members and I ended up giving them some money from the Kickstarter project, so that’s how I met Mark, the archivist. They had been advertising the position for an archivist in the Rough Stuff Journal for months and nobody took it up until Mark came along. When I met him he was at the very start of the job and he was putting adverts in the journal and ringing up people to check if they had photos or other stuff from the past. He started out with minutes from meetings and accounting reports and said to me maybe in six months we should talk again so I might have some photos by then. I actually forgot about the project until I started seeing their Instagram and it was obvious that he found some really nice pictures and we started talking again. At that time he had probably 15.000 slides, mostly 35mm Kodachrome transparencies, as well as film, prints and some medium format negatives, and he had done some scanning but not very systematically. The bulk of it were slides contained in wooden boxes from a guy called Bob Harrison that were exceptionally catalogued. I think there were 34 boxes in all, with around 150-300 slides in, so we divided them up, took the boxes home and looked through these on light boxes. Then we put the best ones together for a proper slide-show with a clicker. We went from 15.000 to 1200 scanned images, and we gave these to the designer, Myfanwy Vernon-Hunt . She came with the idea to structure the book by seasons. That made sense to me as a cyclist, the rhythm of live is dictated by the seasons. Her selection was good and Mark and me played around with the pages and the juxtaposing. We made the book in like six months but it was full on.
Looking at those old Rough Stuff Fellowship photos, what do you think is the biggest difference with off the grid riding today apart from the obvious things like bicycles?
For me cycling is not about competition, I’m not a racer, I like exploring and I like understanding the history, and the geography of the environment by cycling. One of the reasons why the book was so successful is that people also like to see the heritage of what they do. It’s good to look back and see what people have been doing in the past. We do a lot of the same things, the Rough Stuff was like a community organization and was never about racing and performance. It’s not like mountain biking where the focus is on riding everything. Rough Stuff is more about exploring and getting out in the country side. They did a lot of camping and carried al their stuff on their bikes. They were touring but were doing their own version of bikepacking years before it became popular. They weren’t using panniers but were using framebags and barbags instead. The main difference apart from the bikes is that equipment has become lighter, smaller and better, but really it’s the same thing, just in a different time. For years, the editor of the Rough-Stuff Fellowship Journal was a man called Archie Woodward, he refused to publish anything on bikes or kit because he thought it was irrelevant, the only thing relevant he thought was the experience and the ride itself.
On the pictures in the book I saw a lot of Holdsworth bicycles. Were there any types of bikes these guys favored in the old days or did they just ride with the bike they could get their hands on?
At one level I think bicycles didn’t matter, they just rode what they had. Some rode what we’d now call classic lightweight frames from renowned framebuilders like Hetchins. There are a few Jack Taylors in the pictures too, who was a framebuilder from the North-East of England. In the 1960s and 70s, I think, he actually built some ‘rough-stuff’ bikes which look something like early mountain bikes or gravel bikes today. But generally people just rode what they had: some had cheap, heavy undistinguished touring bikes, others lightweight race frames. They did use a lot of Sturmey Archer gears though, to avoid snapping derailleurs. For the Iceland expedition they did in 1958 they had special bikes made by Viking with reinforced racks. But if you can believe it, they were all riding fixed!
Seems like a lot of people I know happen to have one of your books or have at least seen or heard about them, which is pretty unique for print these days. How many copies of the books have you actually been selling?
Like I said before we have this global and tight community, I’m not like ahead of everyone but in the middle of it, because of my job as a writer and the research I’m doing I found these projects that I loved, that I knew other people would love too. For the Rough Stuff book we sold 1000 on Kickstarter and another 1000 quickly after that and we sold another 1000 now.
If the book you want to put out would be like a normal paperback novel, there’s no reason to not make an e-book. So if you’re going to make a book these days it’s got to be beautiful object. One of the advantages of using Kickstarter for the book that it is really transparent. Once we reached a certain target, it was easy to add some pages, use more pictures or use better paper. It’s a business, and of course I want to make money on it but I don’t want to be a huge publisher, I just want to make nice books.
For the Rough Stuff archive book it was important for me to record this culture and this moment in time. Those boxes with slides we got from Bob the photographer (who died in 2002 and didn’t have any children) through his friend Ken, probably would been lost, because they were stored in Ken’s attic. So if Ken had died his children probably would have gone to the attic and would have been like “what’s all this crap, our dad’s not even on it”. So these images, and somehow a part of history, would have been lost.
What’s next for Isola Press, what projects are you working on and will there ever be a 2nd volume of the Rough Stuff Fellowship archives ?
We were planning to prepare a second volume of photos from the RSF archive, but lockdown has stopped that … for now. There’s a lot of old guys we want to go to see and to talk to, and we can’t right now. But the intention is there. So right now, instead, I’m working on a book about a cinema! In a way, it’s kind of similar thing: when they were renovating the Rio Cinema in Dalston, east London, they discovered thousands of slides in a filing cabinet in the basement, which were taken by a community group of unemployed young people in the 1980s. Although I’ve spent half my life in France in the mountains, I actually grew up in inner London, and this was my local cinema. Around the time these teenagers were taking photos, I was sitting there at Saturday Film Club watching “The Jungle Book”! You can see some of the pictures online, they’re amazing: the Instagram is called the “Rio cinema archive” and it’s a great project to work on during lockdown, going through all these pictures trying to spot myself.
So the next project won’t be about cycling, and I also want to do something on the history of outdoor clothing, something on mountaineering… but there will be Rough Stuff volume 2 at some point in the future, I hope!
words: philippe michiels
photo credits: isola press