Richard Sachs and Arrange Disorder: A Literary Meditation

Richard Sachs stands as an icon. He also breaks conventions as an iconoclast. He likes to say, “I didn’t want to be a framebuilder. I became one.” This phrase neatly captures the serendipity that shaped his career: a young man who intended to become a writer ended up becoming one of America’s most revered builders of the most finely wrought handmade bicycles in America.

For more than fifty years Sachs has worked in modest New England workshops, cutting and filing, brazing and aligning, coaxing steel tubes into machines that carry an aura well beyond their mechanical purpose. Yet if you ask him, the story begins not with the bicycles but with words, and with his persistent need to arrange them.

In 1972, Sachs planned to enroll at Goddard College in Vermont to study writing. When the college deferred his admission until the following spring, he began looking for something to occupy his time. An advertisement in the Village Voice caught his eye. A bike shop in Vermont needed help for the summer. He boarded a bus and answered the ad in person, but the shop had already filled the position.

One decision led to another, and soon he flew to London, where he apprenticed at Witcomb Cycles. “Apprenticing” perhaps overstates his role: Sachs spent the better part of a year sweeping floors and lugging boxes through what he later described—fondly, if with a wince—as a Dickensian factory.

When he returned to the United States, he helped launch Witcomb Cycles U.S.A., building frames as best he could from what he had observed in England, since he had received little, if any, formal instruction. By 1975, he struck out on his own, hanging out a shingle as Richard Sachs Cycles. He has not worked another job since.

The irony strikes you immediately. The aspiring writer, eager to arrange sentences on the page, ended up arranging steel in a jig. However, both pursuits shared uncannily similar goals: precision, beauty, and a sense of order in the face of chaos.

This collision of avocations produced Arrange Disorder, Volume 1, a seventy-two–page chapbook that distills a half-century of life at the bench into what Sachs describes as “anecdotes, advice, musings, opinions, reflections, judgements, inspirations, sense, and nonsense,” stemming from a series of essays published on his website under the same title, “Arrange Disorder.” By his own estimate, he has produced more than seven hundred thousand words: each essay running a few hundred words, written not as memoir so much as meditation.

The book’s title, like much of Sachs’s own language, operates as both wry and revealing. Now in his seventies, he describes the project as an attempt to “arrange all the disorder (until now) and get ready for that proverbial fourth quarter.” The phrasing works both literally—straightening the workroom, finding some order in a life of entropy—and metaphorically, acknowledging that the effort itself may matter more than the result. On his website, he writes with characteristic bluntness: “I like order I crave order I live a life of disorder. Deb calls it walking entropy… That’s why I arrange disorder. I try.” He adds, almost as an afterthought: “The closer I get, the further it moves from me. The order, that is.”

The book, then, represents a way of fixing on paper the rhythms of thought that had long accompanied the rhythms of the workshop. “I’m a career framebuilder,” he writes. “Working alone, I make bicycles. I want people to know what I think and what I’ve seen.”

Solitude drives both activities. In the shop, Sachs once produced as many as 140 frames a year. Now, by choice, he makes fewer than fifty. The reduction, he insists, stems not from age or infirmity but from his deepening obsession with quality. Each frame, he believes, ought to bear the full weight of everything he has learned.

The comparison to writing demands attention: the solitary labor, the compulsion to revise endlessly, the belief that perfection hovers just beyond the reach of one more pass with the file, one more tightening of a phrase. Sachs admits as much: the tinkering, the selfish, infinite pursuit of something better, always better. It is not a matter of knowing when to stop, but of knowing when not to proceed.

What gives Arrange Disorder its particular resonance stems not from its catalogue of experience but from its tone—a meditative register that links framebuilding to older traditions of craft. Sachs shows less interest in other bicycle builders than in the kind of makers who preceded the industrial age: luthiers, watchmakers, tailors, ceramicists. The thread that binds them together, he insists, involves “practice, respect for a craft’s history, and mastery.”

To read him means glimpsing a craftsman who regards his work less as production than as dialogue—between hand and material, between tradition and innovation, between disorder and the fragile order that briefly, sometimes, emerges.

Riders know Sachs best for his bicycles, which they often describe as the closest thing to perfection a working machine can achieve. But Arrange Disorder suggests that the “accidental framebuilder” has always worked as a writer—one who simply found his subject in steel, in silver and flux, and in the restless pursuit of order within entropy. In an era of mass production and digital automation, his bicycles and his words alike remind us that some things resist hurrying, resist programming, and resist perfection—they only submit to pursuit. The accident, as it turns out, is destiny.

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