I love BSA motorcycle and have a particular interest in the bikes BSA made for the US market. I learned a long time ago that this puts me in niche in the UK, but it's one I've been happy to fill and I've met a lot of enthusiasts in the US along the road.
A lot of these have been 'met' only in email, but lengthy correspondence and swapping BSA stuff means that with some of these people, I honestly feel I have a sense of comradeship and in some cases, genuine friends.
One of my acquaintances is Bob Meissner, who I first started corresponding with in 2006
Bob got in-touch in response to one of my websites and mentioned that he had a collection of BSA catalogues, brochures and ads going back to the 1930s and would I be interested in copies that I could post on my website?
Enthusiastically, I was and there followed a tidal wave of scanned photos emailed to me over a period of a month or two for me to add to the website. But I never did.
Pressure of work, website authoring inability, pressure of home life all resulted in no demonstrable activity for, well quite a long time and after all the work Bob had put into this, I felt I'd let Bob down pretty badly.
What followed after that was a hard drive failure that I thought had destroyed all the emails, scanned pics and Bob's email address.
However, now several years later in an idle moment while clearing out old PC equipment I came across the disk and wondered as a last chance if I could use some data reclamation tools to retrieve anything from the disk, and... bingo!
I've managed now to reclaim almost everything including Bob's contact details, with which I got in-touch, apologised, and started loading dealer and catalogue pics on my Facebook page because the image upload tools are very easy to use.
But as a taster - or until I find out if / how it's possible to link Facebook photo albums and my blog. here are some of Bob's collection which goes from 1939 right up to the early 70s and is immense - catalogues, brochures, ads, dealer handouts, export, US East and West coast editions... fabulous!
I don't think there's anything else like this on the web... enjoy!
Bob - thanks. Loads!
