Coffee Table Book of: Skateboarding (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Skateboarding is a large format book of skateboarding, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: decks, trucks and wheels, concrete bowls and wooden ramps, street ledges, steps and rails, the board being made, and a few riders seen far off in plain dark clothing.

The board itself is laid out plain: a complete skateboard seen from above, a single truck with its kingpin and bushings, cream urethane wheels, steel bearings, the skate tool and its eight bolts, grip tape pressed onto bare maple, worn shoes, knee pads, a helmet and padded gloves for downhill.

The making follows the wood from a sugar maple and a snowy pile of logs to peeled veneers, some dyed, and the glued stack in its mould under the press, then to wheels poured into moulds, a ramp framed on curved ribs and a fresh bowl smoothed by hand. The past runs from planks on roller skate wheels and clay wheels to flexible fibreglass, drained backyard pools, dry ditches and a weathered launch ramp.

Then the places, empty at every hour and in every season: bowls under frost, blossom and a full moon, a vert ramp under floodlights, a full pipe at evening, a park buried in snow and another lost to weeds, a seaside park dusted with blown sand, granite ledges at dawn and midday, a handrail at night, a flat bar at dusk and a row of slalom cones down a quiet road, with a few small riders far off, carving, dropping in and pushing home.

Short notes run through the book, on the parts of the board, how it is made, and the places riders have sought out: concrete bowls copy the curved walls of the empty backyard pools that riders once sought out, most decks are made of seven thin layers of maple veneer, glued and pressed together, each wheel holds two bearings, so a board rolls on eight of them, and wheels are poured as liquid urethane into moulds, then cut true on a lathe.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.