About 42/21

By way of getting into the spirit of the Grand Depart we have designed and screen printed a limited edition series of celebratory posters. ‘Reyt bien’ was about as close as we could get to summing up our feelings about the Tour de France arriving in our fair city at the end of the pre-cursor to the big race. ‘Reyt’, for any of the uninitiated, or outside Yorkshire, is local for ‘right’. For anyone who managed to escape even the most basic of french lessons, bien is ‘good’. We expect you’ll get it and that didn’t need explaining, but it’s good to make sure, non? Screen printed by Bradbury & Blanchard Gallery, and limited to an edition of 42.

Why 42? Because it’s a magic number. At least to the cycling fraternity. 39? Not so magic. For babies, according to Pavel Tonkov, whose old-school take on gear ratios was particularly Eastern Bloc – hard, driven, the territory of champions. And so, 42 is the number of reyt biens we’re producing. In honour of Tonkov’s celebrated gear ratio of choice, the 42:21. “With a 42 there is never a moment of too big or small, there is no state of flux, there is just a little bit of a push needed on the odd steep climb, and the rest of the time you’ll be rolling cool”, says Tom Southam, who knows his stuff.