Meltdown: Some waffle about making the 2020 MTB yearbook
Meltdown documents 2020 in mountain biking with photography and writing from some of the sport’s keenest observers.
Meltdown, our latest yearbook, brings together the best photography, reporting and comment from the year in mountain biking. It packages everything into a beautifully designed and illustrated 244-page coffee table book.
– Documents the 2020 UCI DH and XC, Enduro World Series and international Crankworx events
– Tells a range of riders’ stories from the year
– Includes photographic and written contributions from dozens of journalists and riders including roaming photographers Sven Martin, Boris Beyer and Sebastian Schieck
– Spans 244 pages of high-quality paper and ink
– Produced in the UK using sustainable materials and carbon-neutral processes
Meltdown is available now for £20 from the Misspent Summers online store and core bike shops.
The book documents the 2020 international race season, covering the UCI downhill and cross-country events, Enduro World Series, and Crankworx Rotorua and Innsbruck. Packed into its pages is a range of other features: comment pieces, photo galleries, cartoons and even a quiz.
Meltdown takes everything that’s great about mountain biking and gives it the full Misspent Summers treatment.
It’s a beautiful, 244-page tome that has been made with much care with the help of copious caffeine doses by the Misspent Summers team, an unlikely bunch of mostly ex-Dirt Magazine staff and contributors.
Altogether, around 40 people were involved in the production of this latest yearbook, from current and ex-pro racers to full-time reporters and photographers. Bringing together such an assorted crew of passionate riders to boil down their experience of the year in the sport was a pleasure; it helped create a wide-ranging and varied set of features that were great fun to pull together into a paper-and-ink bundle.
Production was about as protracted as 2020 felt. We were lucky to secure enough support from ten amazing brands (thank you) to help us begin the process late in the year. Then, when we launched pre-orders in December, a surprising number of people got behind the book before they’d even seen it (thank you very much).
We worked hard through December and January and countered a few hiccups (no thanks, Covid and Brexit), spending endless days and nights online in the new virtual design studio, with the team spread across several countries, time zones and climates. While working through a screen isn’t ideal, and nowhere near as much fun as we usually have when putting a book together, it was still an opportunity to share some time and shit jokes and produce something we’ll all be proud of one day (when the work hangover fades).
Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a ramble.
All that to say: go and check out Meltdown. It’s out now, and it’s our best yearbook to date. We are incredibly happy with how it’s turned out and hope you’ll enjoy reading a copy soon.
