Un grand Salon des Deux-Roues — L’Officiel du cycle, 2 October 1954, the Editorial before the 41st Salon

From L’Officiel du cycle, du motocycle et du camping, 2 October 1954, the paper’s special number before the 1954 Paris Salon du Cycle et du Motocycle, an unnumbered page: the paper’s unsigned editorial before the Salon: 1954 expected to pass a million motorcycles, 800,000 bicycles built in twelve months and some fifteen million cyclists, and the 117 constructors, 78 of them French, that visitors would find at the Parc des Expositions. The title, headings, captions and lists are transcribed as printed; the text is summarized in Ebykr’s words, and the page images carry it in full.

— Page 1 —
[Ebykr summary; the article’s text is not reproduced. The unsigned editorial opens with three paragraphs. If the figures known for the first eight months of the year hold, 1954 will for the first time reach 1,000,000 motorcycles produced in France, a gain of 25 % over the previous year, which the writer says France may be proud of against the discouraged who always cite industrial results abroad; with two and a half million users he adds that France is the world leader in motorcycling. The plain bicycle, of which 800,000 will have been built in twelve months, still has the largest following in France, since the national body of the cycle industry puts its users at some fifteen million, four fifths of whom pay a tax that, he reminds the reader, is meant to fund cycle tracks. This national situation, he concludes, gives the Salon du Cycle et du Motocycle de Paris first place, and by far, among its international counterparts.]

UN GRAND SALON
DES DEUX-ROUES

[Ebykr summary, after the headline. The second part of the editorial argues the point from the exhibit list. Visitors to the Parc des Expositions at the Porte de Versailles will see the latest “2-roues” models from 117 constructors: 78 French, 14 British, 12 German, 5 Italian, 4 Belgian, 2 Austrian, 1 Czech and 1 Hungarian. Makers of equipment will number several hundred. The writer adds that the count of participants is not the only interest of the 1954 Salon, because the technique of motorized two-wheelers is changing fast: after the great “explosion” of the scooter, whose vogue keeps growing, the conventional cyclomotor is mounting a counter-offensive, modernized in its lines as in its components, and hybrid types are multiplying, which he reads, as in mechanics and in plant or animal biology, as the sign of a great prosperity of the species. He closes that this year there is a great Salon of the “2-roues”.]

[A full-page editorial, text only. The text sits inside a thin black ruled frame whose four corners carry a small asterisk-shaped ornament; the frame lines break to leave room for the headline. The body is set in italic roman type in a single column that starts about a third of the way in from the left rule, leaving a wide blank margin at the left, with an indented first line in each paragraph. Across the middle of the page the headline “UN GRAND SALON / DES DEUX-ROUES” stands in two lines of very large, widely spaced, heavy sans-serif capitals, running the full width of the frame and a little past it at the right. No drawing, no photograph, no signature and no advertiser or agency mark appear. Faint mirrored lettering from the reverse of the leaf shows through at the bottom edge, where the words “BOULEVARD LEFEBVRE” can be made out reversed, and faint reversed shapes show through in the right margin.]