I've been keeping an eye out for old mixtes since my wife decided she'd eventually like to have something "light and zippy" in addition to her suspension-fork Globe Carmel. Came across a '80s Raleigh Marathon mixte on our local CL, so hopefully that's still there when she's ready to go bike shopping again (kiddo #2's due date is next Sunday, poor timing to go bike shopping!).

This got me remembering, I sort of wouldn't mind having a mixte for my own use, especially for having a child seat on the back, but aside from wanting handy rack eyelets and stuff, vintage frames I'm seeing online are all really short, like sub-50cm short. My usual klunker frame recently has been a '84 23" Raleigh Record, which is nice to ride but the standover height is a bit tall, even with my recent 650B wheel experiment. So, kind of figuring that a relatively tall mixte frame might be really nice since it might not need a hugely tall stem like I've got on my 21" Alyeska but would still allow lots of standover clearance and relatively easy stepthrough capability. If I'm ever able to appropriate sufficient funds, a Rivendell Yves Gomez may well be the answer, but in the meantime ....

Come to think of it, I'm kind of having a hard time finding info on old mixtes at all. Sheldon's "Retro Raleighs" scans, for example, seem to show diamond frames almost exclusively. Did makers actually publish info on their mixte models back when everything was brazed steel?

Sure, there is endless info out there on mixtes, most brands made them. Most are in the 19 inch frame size range, larger ones are hard to find, and expect to pay a premium.

The Raleigh catalogs are underwhelming.