A Secret History of the Ollie by Craig Snyder is here, and it’s a whopper. It’s two inches thick and 912 pages! It’s going to take a long time to sift through this for a proper review, but in the meantime you can get yours at OllieBook.com.

A horrible screen grab from a good video. Sometimes I like to put a little “skate” in Skate and Annoy. Check out this very short, very ready sequence.

Impact Reduction Apparel has a kickstarter campaign for their product which is essentially a soft insert for a baseball cap made out of a substance that hardens on impact, much like we profiled back in 2007. Quicksilver had originally licensed the technology for snowboarding beanies, but then not much was heard about it. It remains unclear if this is the same technology or not, but it appears to do the same thing. It’s soft and pliable until microseconds after impact, after which the outside momentarily hardens into a shell. The idea being, maybe you secretly want to wear a helmet but are embarrassed. Or maybe you just want a little bit of protection. It’s a good idea if it works, although the short nature of the back of the ball cap might make it ineffective in real world situations. Does it cover enough skull to help if you wilson? I don’t want to find out. It looks like they did some not too scientific tests with fruit and vegetables before taking a more credible approach. The product has not been certified as a helmet yet, which is part of what they want your money for. They’re going to have to rethink the “IRA” name if they want to sell this in the UK…

I’m going to force you to look at the vintage skateboard magazine advertisement gallery.

The July 15th, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone featured a 7 page spread on skateboarding by Tim Cahill and photographs by Warren Bolster. The cover story is on remembering the Beatles. Flipping through the pages is a trip, Roling Stone, supposedly with it’s finger on the pulse of alternative youth culture and rock and roll, but woefully square. One highlight, a full page ad for the Ramones first album, also shown here. A lot of the other ads seemed to be aimed at actual musicians instead of the general public. Check it out after the jump.

I’ve been working on a new addition to the Galleries section of Skate and Annoy. It’s an archive of advertisements from old skateboard magazines. The goal is to cover the 60’s through the 90’s. It’s been interesting going through these old magazines, finding things I’d forgotten about and other I still have no idea ever existed, like the Brian Martin pro model on Action Sports Skateboards. It’s funny to see some of the ads that the smaller companies put out in hopes of breaking into the industry. Like everything on the site, it’s a work in progress. I’ve scanned about 300 ads so far and uploaded only 64, but now that the mechanism is in place it’s really easy to add new ones. There are other ad archives out there, most notably the one at Cal Streets, which I profiled in 2008. They’ve since changed they way their gallery is presented, but it’s still a hefty one. I decided to make one for S&A because I have OCD, and I don’t like having to search/link on other sites when doing “research” for posts here. Plus those other galleries aren’t organized how I’d want them.

What works so far: Everything is tagged by company, rider, product type, year, decade, magazine, magazine issue, and photographer if they are credited. So if you want to sort through ads by any one of those taxonomies, you can.

Things that need work: The navigation and layout is a little clunky right now, and likely will be for the time being while I concentrate on adding new ads. Some of the scans are not the greatest quality. I tried using one of those sheet fed scanners (Brother) and it just doesn’t do a very good job a lot of the time. After I run through the ads that I’ve already scanned (rescanning some of the worst offenders) I’ll be switching to a different scanner. I’d like to add an advanced search so you could do something like search of all ads from Z Products from the 80’s, or all ads with Jason Lee riding for Blind.

PLEASE leave some feedback on ways to improve, keeping in mind that there will be other decades and magazines to be added. Now go visit the Vintage Skateboard Magazine Advert Gallery

– Kilwag

New Orleans is the largest U.S. city without a skatepark! It’s been a long time since we’ve reported on the scene that gave birth to the now defunct Peach Orchard. Since then the park has a new name to go with a sanctioned location and some ramps donated by Spohn Ranch, leftover from the Mississippi Grind skatepark on a floating barge. The next step is to get back to their D.I.Y. roots by pouring their own transition, and they need your help. Parasite Park has one of the slickest incentive programs via kickstarter that I’ve seen. They’ve got some great looking gear that starts at just $7. Go help ’em out!

Why bootleg just one graphic when you can combine them for twice the potential profit? The “designer” of this deck obviously used the Powell ‘Ban This’ deck from 1989 for inspiration on the top. He even copied the name ‘Caballero’ or at least a part of it, but it’s very hard to see in this blurry picture. The bottom of the deck is a copy of a Variflex graphic.

I was going to say “I like this kid” but he’s a grown man for the love of Hosoi. Check out his new video part for Sector 9, it’s got a good mixture of street, transition, ditch, diy and skatepark terrain. The guy that looks a little like GVK in the doubles section is actually his father, Larry Martin.

Another shot of vintage skateboard equipment from one of my favorite sources, old department store catalogs. These offerings from JC Penney were available in 1977. There’s a generic board, a Free Former brand, and two that I can’t quite make out with the name Class in it, possibly ODO Class or DDO class. (Update: Pro Class. Thanks Daymond! Pics added.) At the top the page is the venerable Roller Derby brand roller skates, a company that also made skateboards at the same time.