Faces of Skateboarding was site of the week at Skate Daily last week. Looks like a good book of black and white photos by Daniel MÃ¥nsson. There are short videos on the website including one of Chris Miller but he pretty much just says he likes the photo. Look at the various sections of the site to get a feel for the book. I watched the slide show and thought it looked just okay and the clips don’t do much more for me but THE BOOK shows some sample spreads and makes me think it might be worth owning.

Eww.. gross. Get your mind out of the gutter. Joining Blake Nelson’s Paranoid Park is Nick Hornby’s Slam. You might recognize Nick Hornby as the writer whose books get made into good movies like High Fidelity. Slam’s protagonist is skateboarding obsessed and regularly holds imaginary conversations with Tony Hawk who answers in not always relevant quotations from his autobiography. Sounds like an amusing premise actually, if it weren’t written for young adults. Actually, if you can enjoy Harry Potter, why not Slam?. It’s interesting to note (OK, maybe not) that Tony Hawk is so pervasive that his status as a cultural icon can now be a bit supporting character in books much like Elvis was in the movie True Romance. Hornby’s had a few of his books made into successful movies, so maybe we’ll see a Tony Hawk cameo that’s a little better than what he did in Thrashin. While it’s unclear whether or not royalties were paid to the old 80’s wrist guard company of the same name (Haw!), it is clear that skateboarding is a hot topic for those trying to sell to the young adult market. Speaking of being in the market for young adults (what is…

Sean Cliver has a short interview over at Cool Hunting that is focused on his book Disposable. At the time he gave the interview he had no idea where and when it would show up. I’ve never really trolled Cool Hunting, but it seems like a site for people suffering from really short attention spans, the really lazy or terminally bored. It’s compilation of completely unrelated things that someone has determined “cool.” Disposable has been re-re-released on Ginko Press with minor cosmetic changes and factual corrections making it different from the last version published by Concrete Wave Editions. But of course, if you are a collector, you’ll need to get this one too. Cliver is working on a follow up to Disposable that he hopes will be released in Spring of 2008. Yes, much to my wife’s good humor, for the past 10 months I’ve been working on another follow-up book of sorts. This one will be more “collector” based, and my main intent is to showcase a big gallery of deck images from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and just a smattering of the 00s. I’ve pillaged/shot a number of heretofore unseen collections and archives, so I promise lots…

Want to turn into a professional skateboarder like Ryan Sheckler? Who doesn’t? Now you can avoid all the “paying your dues” BS and get the inside scoop in the Go Pro Book from the good folks at Skateboarderpro.com. It covers such topics as: How do you become a professional skateboarder? How do you get sponsored? How do you make a good “Sponsor Me” video? Where do you send “Sponsor Me” videos? Where do you even start? GO PRO is the one and only STEP BY STEP method that can show you EXACTLY the right plan of action you can start TODAY to take you on a direct path to getting sponsored! GO PRO defines a precise daily, goal oriented system that you can work at your own pace to achieve “levels” that position you in exact ways so that you can become “Sponsor Material”. I can’t wait for the informercial. It turns out they can even help you get a college scholarship. And to think I dropped out of college because of skateboarding.

The Hardy Boys have been in need of an image overhaul ever since that unfortunate peeping-tom conviction. Gone are the days of titles like “The Missing Chums” and “The Mystery of Cabin Island.” Now they aren’t even books, they are graphic novels. Check out #8 in the series, the just released Board to Death. Sure it looks like it was drawn in the 80’s, but it actually just came out this month. I wonder if the fact that they were riding coffin shaped boards was a coincidence or a tribute to the fact that Frank and Joe Hardy are old school. I wonder if Chet get’s hit in the solar plexus? I wonder what a solar plexus is?