Bulgarian postage stamp showing a 
Co-Motion Co-Pilot road bike
with S and S Couplings


This is the stamp and the actual photo that was used to produce the stamp

The Story Behind This Stamp:

We found out about this stamp from a bicycle enthusiast, who was also a stamp collector. He purchased a 100 piece bicycle stamp assortment and upon close examination of this particular stamp, he noticed the couplings. He sent us a scanned image of the stamp and told us that he thought is was patterned after a bicycle model made by Independent Fabrication called a Crown Jewel. We contacted Independent and they reviewed the image but were sure that the bike wasn't theirs because they have always used straight fork blades and these are curved. We contacted several other builders and they all said it wasn't theirs. We were stumped. Soon after that, we noticed that we had a small thumbnail image on the S and S web site that looked like the same bike. Looking deeper into our site, we found the Co-Motion Co-Pilot picture on our very own web site!. It was an exact match and it was right under our nose all the time. Our surprise was outdone only by Dwan at Co-Motion who, like all the other builders that we asked,  had previously told us that the bike wasn't theirs! Of course, upon closer examination, he too had no doubt that it was a Co-Motion Co-Pilot.

We suspect that the artist that hijacked the image, was looking on-line for a road bike with a plain white background that would be easy to work with and this image was perfect in that regard. Our guess is that the artist didn't have the faintest idea what S and S Couplings were and that they would only be found on bikes made for travel. To make the image suitable for a small stamp, it was artistically retouched to eliminate the Co-Motion decals on the top and down tubes along with some other minor items like cable stops. The black cable splitter near the downtube coupler was painted red as if it were part of the frame and if the artist had known that S and S Couplings aren't something found on all road bikes (although we think they should be), they may have been painted out too. The spokes were made darker so they would show up. Notice the exactness of every detail including the cables, spoke count and position, valve stems, pedal position, seat style, chainring style, painted handlebar stem etc. 


This is page 13 of an old Co-Motion catalog that features the same photo.

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