The Best Of Surfer Magazine

Since 1960, Surfer magazine has been chronicling a pastime that confounds description. Now for the first time, Surfer has collected its eclectic array of surf journalism into one volume, from dyspeptic editorials and gnarly travel pieces to great fiction and humor writing. Each piece is introduced by the editors and accompanied by the full-color cover of the Surfer issue in which the article first appeared. With the top names of surf journalism, this authoritative volume defines almost fifty years of Surfer styleand substance.

Over its six decades in print (1960-2020) the legendary Surfer magazine was considered to be the bible of surfing and surf culture. This carefully curated anthology, showcasing the best covers and interior pages serves as a quintessential reference guide to the history of surfing, surf style and design. Founded in 1960 by surfer, artist, and filmmaker John Severson, Surfer was the longest continuously published surf magazine, referred to as “the bible of the sport.” Surfer was firmly established as the sport’s leading voice, serving as a template for a small but growing number of surf magazines around the world. Featuring a mix of travel articles, contest reporting, surf spot profiles, big wave pictorials, and surfer interviews, Surfer worked with the world’s best photographers, writers, and graphic designers. This voluminous anthology features the most time-less, inspirational, and historically significant covers and interior pages from the magazine’s extensive archive and depicts the chronological progression of the sport, the gear, the style, and the world’s top surfers throughout the decades, from Mickey Dora to Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton. This is the perfect book for those who surf or spend time in the ocean and for anyone interested in a historical reference guide to modern day surfing and its highly influential style and subculture.

Surfer Magazine offers the ultimate guide to catching the best waves from the pristine points of Santa Barbara to the sunny beaches of San Diego. For more than 250 spots, this sturdy manual sporting a water-resistant cover delivers a clear assessment of wave quality, prime wave conditions, and local hazards (both natural and manmade). Informative text answers the burning questions that surfers often pose: What tide? What wind? What swell? How are the locals? Are they worse than the sharksor the traffic? With helpful maps, photos, and directions, this Surfer's Guide is sure to become the gold standard for anyone looking to score the perfect wave.

The editors of TransWorld SURF share inside information and jaw-dropping photography in this comprehensive guide to the one-hundred best surf spots on Earth. The editors of TransWorld SURF magazine have been all over—from Australia and California to emerging destinations in West Africa, Japan, Norway and beyond—searching for the best beaches and waves with some of the world’s top surfers. This book collects amazing photos of the one-hundred top spots around the world, along with the pro tips and travel details you need to go there yourself. SURF: 100 Greatest Waves takes you from classic locales, such as Mexico, Fiji, and Thailand, to inside secret spots like Iceland, India, and Wales. Whether you’re a globetrotting barrelhunter chasing the perfect wave, or a weekend wave-rider dreaming of the perfect vacation, let SURF: 100 Greatest Waves take you there.

For half a century SURFER magazine has captured and defined surf culture, from the sport's epic tales and discoveries to its greatest photography and cultural icons. Marking SURFER's 50th anniversary, this impressive volume showcases the magazines best features and most iconic images from throughout the years, along with original behind-the-scenes narratives and previously unpublished photographs. Packed with stories and images from legendary surf personalities on everything from travel and adventure to board design, SURFER Magazine: 50 Years pays tribute to the past, present, and future of surfing.

From the author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go To Hell, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction One of Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament's Top 10 of 2018 It's no surprise that surfers like to party. The 1960-70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws--tanned boys refusing to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water. But in the 1980s, as surf brands morphed into multibillion-dollar companies, the derelict portrait began to harm business. The external surf image became Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, beacons of health, vitality, bravery, and clean-living. Internally, though, surfing had moved on from booze and weed to its heart's true home, its soul's twin flame: cocaine. The rise of cocaine in American popular culture as the choice of rich, white elites was matched, then quadrupled, within surf culture. The parties got wilder, the nights stretched longer, the stories became more ridiculously unbelievable. And there has been no stopping, no dip in passion. It is a forbidden love, and few, if any, outside the surf world know about this particular rhapsody. Drug use is kept very well-hidden, even from insiders, but evidence of its psychosis rears its head from time to time in the form of overdoses, bar fights, surf contests, murders, and cover-ups. Cocaine + Surfing draws back the curtain on a hopped-up, sometimes-sexy, sometimes-deadly relationship and uses cocaine as the vehicle to expose and explain the utterly absurd surf industry to outsiders.

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

Anthology of some 80 articles with 250 (mostly color) photos. An important addition to the jock collection. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR