A few weeks ago, Trevor Graves had a link to a video for a launch party for the Freestylin’ retrospective book pulled together by Mark Lewman:
Anyway, there’s a really short list of influential people I’d still consider heroes, and Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins are two people who heavily influenced me through their magazine when I was around high school and a little before and a little after. I had some pictures of Lew from an event 20 years ago, so I sent them to Trevor to pass on, not really thinking much of it. Saying I have anything from 20 years ago makes me feel really old.
A month or so later I get a short email from Lew asking if I wanted one of these books. They only made 2500, and they’re not for sale, and up until that point I never thought there’d be a chance of getting my hands on one. I’ve never met him, and with the short run that were printed it was a really generous thing to do for someone he’s never met. I was stoked just to get an email from someone like that, let alone an offer for the book.
I just got home a little while ago after a really long day flying home from Florida and going straight to work, and there it was sitting at my door. The frozen dinner I had just picked up was still sitting on the floor by the front door, completely thawed almost an hour later while I was still looking at it… The book is fucking amazing. The creative direction and design of the magazine still holds up today, and the book captures all of what it was back then. There were plenty of lame aspects of freestyle BMX way back then as it was evolving, but the magazine could turn any of that into something amazing. It was a big part of defining action sports as a lifestyle and driving to create the atmosphere that exists today. Magazines like Thrasher did this too, but Freestylin’ took it even further. All of this is was what had led me to always want to work on creating the Burton catalogs.
There’s not many objects I could acquire that would carry the value of something like this, and it’s going to be a lot harder than usual to piss me off this week.
September 2, 2008 10:15 pm | 
