Chapter 5 explores James’s interest in the relationship between the bicycle and authorial publicity through a close reading of his tale about two cycling journalists, ‘The Papers’. During the 1890s, the bicycle’s fashionable status and prominent appearance in debates about female exhibitionism associated it with questions about the role of the press and the public figure. Due to its potential for physical comedy, cycling also features in what I call the literatures of exposure: the detective story, romantic comedy, and the illustrated newspaper. As I argue, the bicycle’s attachment to the physical ‘figure’ makes it a troubling metaphoric resource in ‘The Papers’, which satirizes the celebrity’s ‘eagerness to figure’ by drawing attention to the authorial work of ‘figuring’ in which the journalists are constantly engaged, and to the creation of the author as a public figure. This chapter also glances at how later writers have employed the bicycle to speculate about Henry James himself. Hemingway’s euphemistic reference to ‘Henry’s bicycle’ in The Sun Also Rises – an allusion to James’s rumoured castration – is one of several portrayals of the author as a cyclist, which draw upon the bicycle’s connotations with exposure to trope James’s aversion to publicity.