escapecollective.com
Richard Sachs is writing it all down
Joe Pugliese, Richard Sachs, Brian Vernor, Nick Czerula, Alisa Rashish - all courtesy Richard Sachs
Richard Sachs wants to make it clear that he is not retiring. Even as the celebrated framebuilder is past a half-century in the business, he’s still going to the workbench every day because he finds purpose and fulfillment in the work.
Last year, however, Sachs did start to put the final touches on another long-term project: a series of slim books that is part memoir, part handbook, part meditation, and thoroughly, authentically Richard Sachs. Titled _Arrange Disorder_ , the series traces his life and career arc, and is an attempt to distill the decades of writing – on his website, in forums, and in his unpublished journals – and share the most meaningful parts.
There are four volumes so far, with more planned; part four is just out now. The books are non-linear, and that’s by design. “I don't want each particular volume to be like, ‘the correspondence book’ or ‘the old catalogs,’” he said. “I’d like each book to have a cross-section of things.”
Sachs, himself, is in many ways an open book. He’s not shy about sharing his honest assessment of the custom framebuilding industry today, for instance. Agree with him or not, after more than 50 years at the bench, he’s earned the right. But Sachs isn’t trying to be framebuilding’s metaphorical torchbearer, just a literal one, and his frank and critical eye extends to his own work (I can picture his eyes rolling as he reads that "dean of American framebuilding" line above, even if it is true).
What happens to framebuilding after Paragon is gone?The celebrated supplier’s legacy will carry on under a new owner, but the future of craft bicycle making is still wide open.Escape CollectiveJoe Lindsey
In our discussion below, Sachs talked about the books, how they came to be and what they represent, but he also spoke openly about his own struggles with imposter syndrome and his acceptance and embrace of the imperfections inherent in making machines by hand. Richard Sachs knows he will never make the perfect bicycle, and he’s perfectly OK with that.
__This interview has been edited for clarity and, believe it or not, length.__
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**Joe Lindsey:_Arrange Disorder_ is a collection of mostly existing writings. Did you write anything new for this that's not on your website?**
Richard Sachs: Yeah, because not everything is on my website, which is where, up until about COVID, anything I wrote was deposited there, mainly for future reference or use. By the time the aughts were coming and going, I realized I had spent – willingly, of course – an inordinate amount of time on forums and listservs and whatnot that were primarily devoted to framebuilding. I realized, like, “I got a lot of stuff,” and I thought if I can go back and find all the stuff that I think should be kept or permanent for myself, I'm going to paste it in someplace else, and that became, you know, the original page.
People might think that I'm on the internet all day, but the thing is, I don't use the phone. I don't have customers [walking in] and whatnot, so it's my way of keeping myself aware of what's going on out in the real world, and I really wanted all this stuff to be in one place. And then in the middle of our time in the woods [_Sachs moved to rural New Hampshire for a period of time._ - Ed.], I started thinking about the bigger picture, and I thought, “Well, I have all this stuff written, you know, dozens or scores or even hundreds of entries. How about if I start writing for myself rather than just mining my old comments and replies to other people?”
So I made it a point to go up into the loft, you know, maybe five or six days a week, and grab something, whether it was a catalog of mine from 1981, or a letter I received from somebody or God knows what, and then simply sit in the chair and write something about it. At first it was forced, but then it became kind of something I looked forward to, and then little by little, time and the years passed, and one day, probably in 2005, I took the motherload of it, I did a ‘select all,’ and grabbed the entirety of what was there at that point, and I pasted it into a Word doc, and I had over 600,000 words.
**JL:** **Wow, 600,000!**
RS: Yeah, that's when I realized, “Holy shit, there's something here.” I had a client who was in publishing and he was reading my entries regularly. He got in touch with me and said, “You know, you got a book here,” so of course affirmation is like a drug, for me at least, and so Deb [_Richard's wife - Ed._] and I went to Boston and spent the day at their offices, and he proposed to me that we make a book. So that's the beginning of the next thing.
So long story short, in in my head, I thought, “Well, I already have the book. We simply have to take everything that's on my website and make it look good. And somebody with some editing skills would tell me what shouldn't be there, and then voila, we publish.” But of course, I realized it wasn't that simple.
This guy had an editor assigned to me, and they thought, “Well, it really needs to be a book, not a bunch of essays.” Unless your name is Emerson, nobody wants to read a book of essays. They suggested I get a ghostwriter. I knew a woman from New York City who had done some work that included me in a book that she published for a museum, and she agreed to do it. About four months later, she got hired by the _New York Times_.
I was lingering for a year or two, and I kept writing on my own. Then a friend of mine from Connecticut, who taught at Yale, pushed me into writing everything in a memoir form. However, none of it resembled what I'm doing now, and then I kept thinking, “OK, now we have about 300 pages of a book. When do we do something about it?”
The series so far: Four slim books, more to come.
So I found somebody else in the bicycle and the publishing business, who had an old editor friend in New York who he thought I should talk to because they have a company that could maybe get me to the next level. And he says, "Well, we could find you an agent. But we think it is a little too soon for that. What you need is a killer proposal, because that will get you an agent. So he gave me a tiered list of how they bill and what you get for each level, and it was like going to a car wash. You just want the car washed, or you want the thing on your rearview mirror that smells nice? I figured I'll take a chance. I've already spent about $30,000 with my first editor, pre-production editor, thinking we would just roll this along, and I just thought “Well, I'm in pretty deep now.”
So ultimately, after about 18 months of emails and maybe one or two phone conversations, they sent me the proposal that I paid $10,000 for, and I thought “Oh my God, this is not me. They've kind of created a persona based on everything they read.” In addition to getting your killer proposal, they give you 10 [agent] names and a mock email to send to each of those names. They were handpicked and thought they would be the best targets for this killer proposal. So all of them were strikeouts, and I thought, “Holy shit! I didn't anticipate this. I thought like we're good to go.” So I wrote to them and I said, “Hey, I didn't really think this was going to be the way it ended up, but I spent almost two years. I did everything that you asked me to do, and I got nothing.” And the replay was basically, “Well, for another you know $2000 we could give you 15 names that we think would be good.” I thought, “I don't think so.”
So there was a lull, and then I thought, “I got to go back to what feels right.” What I felt was right, what I wanted to do, was “let’s give the public a way to read what was already written and continue writing.” So I thought about it for a while, and I had known my friend John Segal from the '90s on several levels, and I knew he was also a book designer [_and_ Escape _member, as John noted when graciously furnishing the photos used to illustrate this article – Ed._]. So I contacted him. I told him everything I just told you. I thought, “I got nothing to lose. This is what I envision. What do you think?”
> This is how I got here. These are the things that inspired me.
-_Sachs, on the reason he started the_ Arrange Disorder _series_.
And before you know it, within a year, we had taken enough content to create the first small book of 72 pages. He and I both had a friend in West Haven that had a huge publishing and printing business called GHP Media and, of course, I could have probably shopped this overseas and gotten the printing done for a third of the cost, but GHP Media was just like a candy store worth of presentation and colors and capabilities, and John's best friend, Ted, worked there, so we decided to give Ted the business. And then the first one came out. I kind of did my best to promote it. We went immediately to the second one. There was a little lull, and we did the third one, and now we're doing the fourth one.
So that's how I arrived here. If somebody says to me, "Oh, we heard you have a manuscript or a memoir,” I'll talk to them [about a different book]. But the driver here and my motivation remains these precious little books of just enough information so that I could say, “This is how I got here. These are the things that inspired me. These are the places in my life where I felt or remain vulnerable,” and you know, just kind of roll it forward.
**JL: So, you described this long circle, which took years of going to various agents and ghostwriters and agent representatives and all of this kind of thing, only to come back to where you started, doing most of this yourself. And so this is something that basically you and John put together entirely from design to editing to all of that kind of stuff. Correct?**
RS: There's nobody else involved except for Ted and whoever works at the printing press. Actually, the printing press is bigger than my little town here, so I shouldn't really call it a printing press. So that brings us back to the present. I have to tell you: The fact that these things are small books, the inspiration for that, I have to give mostly, if not entirely, to [Columbus Tubing CEO] Antonio Colombo over in Europe.
Photo © Brian Vernor
When I was over there giving a presentation for the 100th anniversary [of Columbus], he also has this really nice art gallery, which I think is his primary interest. And every time they did a presentation or a gallery opening, they'd create a book that goes with it. And he had a whole wall of books that were all about the size of a DVD case with a spine, so that you could read it if you turn your head. And I thought these were pretty cool because the one he did on the show that I was involved with was a set of three books, and I came home with I think one or two sets, and they've always been something that I thought “Oh, these are so beautiful that you don't even want to open them.” They're just like little pieces of architecture.
So when I was chatting with John about this several years ago, I sent him all these small books that I had been saving through the years, and I said, "This is the direction I want to go.” What's inside is important, but I also think that I wouldn't mind turning heads with just what these things actually look like or feel like in your hand.
**JL:** **I wasn't sure what it would be when you offered to send them, and when I got them, I got this immediate sense of the quality and the intentionality behind everything about it, from the design to the printing, everything. It feels very much like a Richie Sachs project, honestly, because it's very carefully considered.**
RS: Yeah, I appreciate that, and that's really the goal. Because in this era we're living, where everything is digital, on a platform or social media or Substack, I wanted to go completely the other direction. Once I put myself through the agency and the ghostwriter and pre-production editor thing, I thought, “These are going to be like my bikes.” You know, nobody's going to touch them unless they're part of the inner circle.
**JL:** **You said something early on about how you copy-pasted everything into a Word doc and realized that you had some 600,000 words of writings. The editor in me has to know: How the hell did you edit that down into four small 72-page books?**
RS: Well, I haven't. I think with luck and enough heartbeats, four books will become 14. Everything is kind of like a moving target. But what John and I envision at this point is that there are certain themes in each book that I think will continue, but I don't want each particular volume to be like, ‘the correspondence book’ or ‘the old catalogs.’ I'd like each book to have like a cross section of things. Even if it's a poem I wrote or some story that I wrote about what I do in the morning at 6:15 when I take my dog to the cemetery, or anything. I want people to be exposed to the fact that I'm a human being. I'm not simply a bikemaker who's trying to put down in print what it takes to be a bikemaker.
**JL: That said, you write a lot about the process of becoming a bikemaker and this journey of expertise. And it seems like your view for sure is that it comes only with time, and that seems like a very hard lesson at a time when there's always a faster way. I'm curious how your understanding of that process deepened over the decades of your work.**
RS: Well, I'd say it began to crystallize in the internet era, which for me is roughly from 1999 forward. Because I kind of think that's when I started participating, like daily, on internet things. There's really no nice way for me to say this, but I think that the 21st century interest in framebuilding, which came kind of in the internet era as a result of forums and NAHBS and other bike shows and websites that heralded the next big thing in framebuilding, I kept seeing this complete lack of practice, and lack of business acumen, and lack of any really deep participation in the sport of riding a bike.
It seemed like a lot of people, if not most people, wanted to associate framebuilding with craft and with the maker movement, and I kind of thought, “Well, that's very, very nice, but these are vehicles, and people take them on the open road, and I think that one needs a certain amount of practice and supervision to be able to say without a doubt that you can stand behind your work.”
> I'm sure a lot of people hate on me because I'm one of those guys that says, “You can't do it.”
It's not a question of, “My bikes have a stainless steel head badge,” or, “My dropouts double as a bottle opener,” or God knows what. There was so much of that stuff for the first 10 or 15 years of the internet, at least _my_ internet, that I kind of thought, “I don't want to be a prick about it, but you don't have a fucking clue what you're doing.” I would never actually say that, but I think that I was able to use my wordsmithing to get that message across.
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