Warshaw spent years assembling this — fifteen hundred entries covering surfers, breaks, board designers, films, magazines, contests, terminology, and the odd corners nobody else bothered with. It’s alphabetical and it’s browsable to a dangerous degree: You look up one thing and lose an hour. The tone is what makes it, because he writes short biographies with real judgment in them rather than press-release summaries. It later became the online Encyclopedia of Surfing, which he still runs, but the printed volume is the object.
The Encyclopedia of Surfing