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For The Record

Surfer

September 2017

With Encyclopedia of Surfing, History of Surfing and Above the Roar together on one website, Matt Warshaw has created the world’s most colorful and comprehensive look at surfing’s past

- Todd Prodanovich

According to esteemed historian, author and former SURFER editor Matt Warshaw, it’s an uphill battle getting surfers to click on links with terms like “history” and “encyclopedia” in the headline. “People hear those two words and in their mind it’s like, ‘Eat your vegetables,’” says Warshaw. “But I know how to make surf history dance and move. Our past is just as funny and tragic and ridiculous as the present, and you get a 3D quality when what you’re experiencing today connects to what surfers experienced in the past. There’s a resonance to that.”

This story is from the September 2017 edition of Surfer.

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60 Years Ahead

We had a whole plan for this year. Funny, right? Surfer's 60 year anniversary volume was going to be filled with stories nodding to SURFER’s past, with cover concepts paying homage to the magazine’s most iconic imagery. Our new Page One depicts something that’s never happened in surfing before, let alone on a prior SURFER cover. And our table of contents was completely scrapped and replaced as we reacted to the fizzing, sparking, roiling world around us. In other words, 2020 happened to SURFER, just like it happened to you.