In my continuing quest to read as much as I can about Ducati Motorcycles, tonight I’d like to add one more rather opinionated review of yet another Ducati book. For the past month and a half I’ve been working my way through “Ducati Design In the Sign of Emotion” by Decio Giulio Riccardo Cagugati and earlier tonight I basically wrapped up reading it.

Usually this is where I gush endlessly over what a fantastic read such-and-such book was, only tonight I can’t say I feel very passionate about “Ducati Design In the Sign of Emotion”. While I’d love to say that it’s yet another fantastic read for the Ducatisti faithful, sitting here right now I find it hard to describe how little I feel personally invested in the book. Completely let down might be to strong of a phrase to use, but I had hoped that Cagugati’s book would shead all sorts of light into the design process at Ducati over the years - much like “Ducati 999 Birth of a Legend” did in a very specific manor for the new 999 and 749 models. Yet ‘Ducati Design’ makes me feel less connected to marque perhaps because even though the words ‘design’ and ‘emotion’ are in the title the truth is this is really a history book - not a thesis on the creative process within the walls of Ducati over the years.

I suspect one could make the argument that at Ducati these two elements have been and continue to be intertwined entities. In many ways I think this is the connection that Cagugati is going for, only for me personally the book seems slightly disjointed and hard to engaged with and therefore makes the connection between the history of the company and the creative process over the years at the company relatively hard to follow and certainly hard to connect. And while I find moments of the Ducati company history quite fascinating, what I was really hope to read about was a much more specific look as to why the different designers and engineers at the company made the choices and design decisions they did on each particular model over the years.

After finishing the book, it struck me that perhaps I didn’t get into the book as well as ‘Birth of a Legend’ because I didn’t grow up with many of the famous Ducati models over the years, so perhaps I didn’t have the emotional or personal investment in each specific model that this book needs in order to succeed. I greatly appreciate many of these models in a historical context, but I also don’t dream of riding them or owning one. The parts of the book that I found most interesting and fulfilling were the ones that covered the more modern bikes. The strongest of which were the chapters on the creation of the original Monster model line, the evolution that took place and allowed Massimo Tamburini to create the 916 and the creation of the year 2000 Mike Hailwood Replica bike, aka the MH900e.

While I didn’t outrightly enjoy the book, I do think that Cagugati did a wonderful job getting several of the key members of the Ducati team to speak seemingly quite frankly about their time with the company and specifically about the projects they were working on. The book is also filled with numerous interesting insights into the history of Ducati. For instance, I had no idea that famed Ducati designer Fabio Taglioni was offered a job with Ford and turned it down or was a close personal friend of Enzo Ferrari. Also, I have to greatly compliment whomever did the graphic design. The book is wonderfully laided out and makes a very pretty to look at coffee table item. The photographs are also quite amazing, especially the early publicity materials.

In the end, I’m glad I bought the book and checked it out. I just wish it had a bit more horsepower.