This is the story of the production of the book “Desmodromie” in pics and text.
I finally managed to post copies in PDF of two bookchapters, one in English (255 KB) and one in German (2.200 KB).
[Nb Copyright 1990 by H.J.J. Cloosterman and F.P.G Tijsse Klasen].
From “Desmodromie” are no more copies available, but capita selecta (in Dutch, English and German) are published in PDF on this page also.
The book was written in line with our classification. That was already in 1989 and the pages are printed with the famous but not so good Star NL 10 needle printer. Quite nostalgic.
I translated Chapter X (Group 7A featuring the Velocette system) into English (5 p.):
CHAPTERX
I had Chapter VII (Group 5 featuring Mercedes W196/Osca-Maserati/Porsche/Ducati4valver) professionally translated into German (31 p.):
KAPITELVII
In Dutch I publish here in laser print quality the Table Of Content
Chapter VIII (Group 6A systems) p. 85-108 (3 MB):
GROEP6A
The list of ever produced systems as known in 1989 consisting of only 40, among which were still quite some mysteries.
In 19 years I increased this number to 77 (69 true desmo and 8 semi-desmo) systems and solved many mysteries:
SYSTEMEN
The list of references (Literature) used:
LITERATUUR
The Index:
INDEX
The start of the desmobook was about 1984 [bibliography desmo(patent)literature] and writing a series of desmo articles for the Dutch Ducati Club in cooperation with Francisco Tijsse Klasen. First using the famous German Adler typewriter. Already in 1984 I bought the Sinclair QL computer with operating system and two inbuild microdrives : one for programms and one for data. Some time later I bought a second one for Francisco. See the two TV-sets used as monitors in the first pic in second row. In 1982 I bought my first computer a Sinclair ZX81 and a ZX Spectrum as well. It became a second “hobby”.
In the physical collection I already had Ducati desmo-heads from the single cylinder; the bevel-twin and the parallel-twin and some perspex models in one valve lay-out only (pic 1991).
In the suspension files I filed the desmo documentation for the book.
January 1988 I bought an IBM-clone PC with 3,7 MHZ processor and 640 K intern memory. It had a so called Turbo button, soaring the computing speed up from 3,7 to an astonishing 8 MHZ. [Nb These lines are typed on a Pentium IV PC with a 2.3 GHZ computer with 1 G internal memory and 200 G hard disk].
The Desmo manuscript was ready for about one half, so we had to stream the files from the QL to the new PC. With the new wordprocessor Word Perfect and later with the Desk Top Publishing programm “Ventura Publisher” we laboriously produced the about 200 pages. There was not enough memory to add digital scanned pictures of the patents, so we Xeroxed, cut (with real scissors) and pasted (with real glue) the pics on the laser printed textpages.
Summer 1989 a printing office copied these pages and the bindery made 5 copies in imitation leather cover (see Bordeau red pic). Spring 1990 we decided to publish our book on our own, since publishers regarded this desmo-title much too specific (very small market) and we had to have it translated first in German and/or in English. The “manuscript” was printed in offset procedure in the same printing office. Edition was only about 240 copies, which were sold to members of the Dutch Ducati Club and some very famous customers.
Co-author Francisco who speaks Italian fluently visited the Ducati factory in summer 1990 and at that occasion handed over our desmobook to Fabio Taglioni and Massimo Bordi. He also interviewed both on the very subject.
