If you picture the hilly terrain of Worcester County, the bumpy cobblestone alleys of Beacon Hill Boston, and the snow-covered coastline of the North Shore, it’s hard to imagine that the Commonwealth was once a national hub for bicycling.

Overman Wheel Company, based in Chicopee (near Springfield), was king of the late nineteenth century bicycle boom. Their rival Pope Manufacturing Company was based just thirty miles to the south in Hartford Connecticut. In the 1890s everyone wanted a bicycle.

Enticing advertisements in ladies’ magazines, illustrated with pictures of carefree wheelwomen, touted the bicycle’s capacity to provide upper class white women with previously unknown freedom of movement. Cycling bloomers were manufactured in many styles and fabrics for daring ladies. Bicycle clubs and riding schools which permitted women began to emerge all over the Northeast—though none were keen on enrolling non-white members. The bicycle boom, just like the suffrage movement, was exclusionary and elite.

Bicycle companies accordingly began to market to the upper-class sensibilities of their highest-paying customers. Overman Wheel Company and Pope Manufacturing Company engaged new illustrators in the Art Nouveau style, a movement emerging out of Europe known for its sinuous, seductive lines and growing popularity among upper-class American art lovers. With the talents of these provocative, experimental illustrators on hand, they created catalogs and posters which were not just advertisements—but masterpieces. Both employed the illustrator Will H. Bradley, who also owned and operated his own press in Concord, Massachusetts. His Aubrey Beardsley-like illustration for Columbia Bicycles 1895 catalog was promoted by the manufacturer as “a work of art.” His cover girl, adorned in a voluminous fur coat, cascades across the page, mirrored by an alter ago in stark profile. Her likeness is carved into the paper with the characteristic woodcut-like lines of the Art Nouveau style, a superficial ode to the Ukiyo-e prints of Japan.

With less obligation for clubs, shops, and manufacturers to appeal to the whims of the elite, the doors of the cycling world suddenly opened to many previously discriminated against. Ultra-expensive designer bicycles began to fade from the pages of catalogs around the same time the notoriously racist League of American Wheelmen disbanded.

The cycling trade advertising collections of the Phillips Library represent a flashing moment in history when almost anyone could have a bicycle, but not all could afford (financially or socially) the lifestyle that made cycling so popular. Lavishly illustrated catalogs, with golden gilt text and ornate embossing symbolize just how dramatically advertising art may bend to the whims of the most powerful consumer.