On the contrary, I’d say. People cared so much that they started to carry out his vision on their own terms, but shorn of the bizarre Victorian whimsy that festoons the latter-day Riv frames.

Grant is a victim of his own success, or to be more precise, the successful dissemination of his ideas, since the days of those B’stone catalogues and creatures like the XO-1. Others have indeed been paying attention and taking notes. And not just boutique builders. The big brands all now carry “gravel bikes” or “adventure bikes.” Petersen is far from the only influence behind this, but he has been an unusually forceful spokesperson for a set of values, including the idea that an all-rounder, non-specialist bike for “you and me” can and should be as beautiful and well-made as a race-oriented bike.

The force of his voice goes hand in hand with the stubborn Quixotic streak that has led him to stick, beyond a fruitful point, with imprinting upon Riv bikes his own “weird” personal aesthetic preferences and nomenclature, even what seems at times like quirkiness for its own sake. That does not a sound business model make, but it’s all of a piece: the same stubbornness that led him to enact and propagate his principles leads him to propagate double top tubes as well as names seemingly pulled out of the random pages of yellowed tomes behind the glass case of an antiquarian bookseller...or something like that.