You may have seen pictures of the very first bicycles, odd-looking objects that look more like instruments of torture than useable vehicles. Luxuries like pneumatic tires were indeed unheard of.

However, toward the end of the 1800’s, the bicycles were becoming more advanced and soon were looking much alike the bicycles of today (although I think gears were not yet invented). Now, they were useful and affordable, and everybody wanted one.

At the time, there were many local manufacturers of bicycles, all competing for business. They did their best to capture the attention of potential customers by doing advertising through such mediums as colorful posters. These artful posters are now known as “vintage bicycle posters“. And even back then, an effective sales tactic consisted of associating the product with some attractive young female.

Therefore, you will find that one very common poster theme is a nubile female (preferrably scantily clad), riding a bicycle - or even flying on a bicycle!

There is also another rather popular poster theme: the Muscular Male bike rider. This theme seems to appear a bit later, around the 1920’s or thereabouts, and may for instance show a bicycle race at high speed.

You can even find vintage bicycle posters drawn by well-known artists. There is for instance Alfons Mucha, who became famous with his “art noveau” style. I have seen one nice example of a vintage bicycle poster by him, featuring a very pretty young woman standing by her bicycle. (Incidentally, I happened to read somewhere that Mucha himself didn’t really like doing all that commercial art, and also wasn’t happy with his work being labelled “art noveau”.)

Nowadays, original prints of vintage bicycle posters are rather rare. They were used for advertising a product, and therefore throwaway objects. The surviving examples are sought after by collectors and quite pricey.

But don’t despair! There is a huge inventory of reprinted copies of original posters available at very reasonable prices from several websites selling posters. Just go there and browse around.