“One of the things I love about motorcycles is the variety of people who are fanatics about them—you tend to have this idea of a motorcyclist as either a super trendy tatted café racing hipster, or a Sons of Anarchy denimed-up gangster.
But the truth of the matter is that people who love escaping into the hills on motorcycles are about as varied as they come,” reveals Maxim Deputy Editor Nicolas Stecher, who also happens to be co-author of Assouline’s new uber-luxe The Impossible Collection of Motorcycles coffee table book. “That means that the type of motorcycles that were built to appeal to these passionate riders over the past 150 years are about as varied as Ben & Jerry’s.”
For the second edition of The Impossible Collection of Motorcycles, Stecher and co-author Ian Barry added ten new 21st-century bikes to the hundred they collected for the first edition, which focused on the previous century.
Featuring only the rarest, coolest, and most pivotal motorcycles since 1900, this new edition adds to Assouline’s vaunted Impossible Collection series, which has previously shined a light on everything from wines to Patek Philippe timepieces to even Formula One cars—which also happens to be included in our Ferrari F1 feature in Maxim’s September/October issue.
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And these aren’t just routine coffee table books, mind you. They’re massive in scale (16 x 19 inches), and boast beautiful time-consuming and rare printing techniques such as hand-tipped images and hand-binding; the 170 images come presented on thick, archival-quality cotton paper with a PVC clamshell case and metal plaque.
With Barry’s pedigree designing and building museum-level custom bikes under the Falcon Motorcycles marque, and our esteemed editor’s long history in automotive journalism, the hundred bikes assembled here are each a gem worthy of the book’s title. Consider Evel Knievel’s famed Harley-Davidson XR750 on which he leapt over the Caesars Palace fountains, breaking countless bones upon impact when his jump fell awry.
Aerial view of contestants in the Mint 400 Motocross endurance race through the Mojave Desert, Nevada, September 1971. Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, contracted to write an article on the race for Sports Illustrated magazine, turned his coverage into the novel ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’
Mint 400 Motocross Race, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Or early unicorns of engineering, such as Glenn Curtiss’s iconic 1907 V8, for which the famed aviator impossibly bolted a massive 4.4-liter V8 engine onto essentially a glorified bicycle frame to create a true spectacle of mechanical force. Hitting 136 mph, the Curtiss V8 shattered the land speed record and held it for decades.
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But which is our deputy editor’s favorite? “That’s a tough one,” Stecher struggles, seemingly running through the hundred motorcycles in his mind. “I’d say my two favorites are the BMW R7, which graces the cover—an unbelievable one-off specimen of German engineering and art-deco design that was thought lost for nearly 70 years until discovered in 2005 in a BMW warehouse. What a story, and what a bike. And maybe the Britten V1000—a superbike entirely designed and built by a New Zealand madman in his garage, which beat factory teams with infinitely deeper wallets. That’s another thing: I really dig the visionaries behind these bikes, all of them the best kind of rogues and renegades this planet needs.”
Of course, a tome of this rare scale and quality boasts a $1,400 price tag to match. Find The Impossible Collection of Motorcycles (2nd Edition) at Assouline.com.
This article originally appeared in Maxim’s September/October 2025 issue. Follow Deputy Editor Nicolas Stecher on Instagram at @nickstecher and @boozeoftheday.
