Recently, I’ve been clued into an interesting literary reference concerning the name of the Wandertec CELLO bike case. My uncle had been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the literary classic written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1967. He came across a passage which would seem to be the inspiration for naming a bike case “CELLO”.
Marquez writes, ‘Besides Fernanda’s old trunk, which they had sent her off to school with, she had two upright trunks, four large suitcases, a bag for her parasols, eight hat boxes, a gigantic cage with half a hundred canaries, and her husbands velocipede, broken down in a special case which allowed him to carry it like a cello.” I should note that this quote is the only reference to this “special case” for bikes. Though my uncle was certain that he had figured out how the name for the Wandertec bike case had been determined, this was not the source , just an intriguing coincidence. The true source of the CELLOS name was inspired by Philip Novotny, the originator of the BOB trailer itself. Philip has been involved with the project on a conceptual level since close to its beginnings. He was discussing the concept with a friend. They were discussing the often awkward difficulties of checking a bicycle on an airline and dealing with the inconsistent over-sized baggage policies. As it seems that bicycles are sometimes discriminated against with higher charges, the idea of naming a bike case as something that was charged more favorably was born. By naming a bike case the “CELLO”, the traveler could report with honesty that they were transporting a CELLO.