Bicycle Metaphor for "In with the New Year" (1898)

The Library of Congress has digitized many of the "centerfold" color illustrations from Puck magazine including this one that shows a young woman riding in on a bicycle as the arriving new year 1898.


1898's arrival will (hopefully) drive out "Bryanism" and "hard times"

The text reads, "Puck's greeting to the new year - Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!"

Title - Puck's greeting to the new year / Ehrhart.
Creator(s) - Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), ca. 1862-1937, artist
Date Created/Published - N.Y. : Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1898 January 5.
Medium - 1 print : chromolithograph.
Summary - Print shows Puck holding a lithographic pen, greeting the New Year, a young woman labeled 1898 riding on a bicycle and spilling flowers from a cornucopia straped to her back; an old woman labeled 1897 rides off on a bicycle into a dark and dismal background, stirring up a cloud of dust labeled "Bryanism" and "Hard Times", and showing two furies.
Notes - Title from item.
Illus. from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, (1898 January 5), centerfold.

From the Library of Congress - full record and TIFF version. The cataloger who created the records (such as the one above) has a blog post at the Library of Congress site about the Puck collection that this comes from.

After having created this entry, I realized that "Puck's greeting" (Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!) was the same as a title of a blog post from a fellow in England who covers some of the same 1890s-1900s bicycle topics that I do - oops. (His blog appears in "my blog list" but that doesn't mean I look at the entries all the time.) Well, I have presented an image of the full layout of the magazine pages and provided the full record as well as a link to the full record so my post is a little different. And different people can independently come to the same idea.