Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of ?The Perfect Vehicle? and other books.

In 1997, Melissa Holbrook Pierson published The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, a delightful book that chronicles her love affair with motorcycles as well as the unique cultural and historical landscape of the two-wheeled world. In 1998, while struggling my way through graduate school in Philadelphia, I bought a motorcycle and learned to ride.

Within the first year of my own love affair with motorcycling, I read ? no, I devoured ? The Perfect Vehicle. Not only did Pierson artfully articulate the full spectrum of emotions, sensations, and experiences that are familiar to any motorcyclist and evoke the ?ride to live, live to ride? credo, she educated me about the exciting new world I had come to inhabit.
When I read Pierson?s account of buying a Moto Guzzi Lario from a small European bike shop called The Spare Parts Company tucked away on a narrow street in the Old City section of Philadelphia, an area I explored regularly on late-night pub crawls and weekend wanderings, I felt an even stronger connection to her book. I had been to the shop before, and my then-girlfriend was friends with the proprietor.

On the 25th anniversary of The Perfect Vehicle, considered one of the best books ever written about motorcycles, we reprinted a review published in the August 1997 issue of Rider and which can be found on our website here. We also reprinted Pierson?s introduction to the Spani...