When I started working in surf media I remember loading up all the magazine archives I could get my hands on. I had access to every volume of ING and ER — my desk was literally in the archive. Instead of windows, I had binders full of surf history to stare at.

I would check them out and sit amongst the fountains in the Huntington Beach public library reading and sifting through endless pages, filling in my knowledge gaps — basically making sure I was qualified for the job I was getting.

Buttons at Backdoor, circa 1978 from the EOS archive.

It’s been a couple decades since those days in the library and I’m still very much an undergrad on surf history, but with my subscription to the Encyopedia of Surfing, I kinda feel like a scholar. Which brings me to Matt Warshaw and his Encyclopedia of Surfing Project.

Surf culture has been documented in a beautiful (albeit chaotic) way thanks to magazines, videos, photographers and filmmakers. What we lack in organization, we’ve more than made up for with qualify artists to captured the spirt of surfing. We have a cultural archive to be proud of…but our platforms to view them are nearly extinct. The Surfer’s Journal is the only print media outlet left in the US and there are only so many Craigslist Kevin’s whose families allow them to hoard the surf archive of the past.

Matt was the editor at Surfer Magazine at one time and he’s corrected, assisted and reprimanded me for getting things wrong plenty of times. Lately, he’s built an incredible digital archive and library of all surf media from the past and present. It’s a thankless and financially horrifying endeavor. But we definitely need someone to do it and no one is more qualified than Matt. He’s literally surfing’s only certified historian and his commitment to this project must make him some level of surf martyr. The dude lives in Seattle these days too…and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he does so that he doesn't get distracted from his work.

Skip Frye in California, 1967. PHOTO: Ron Stoner

We’re subscribers and I can’t tell you how often we either reference something we found on the EOS, or how often we’ll just go dive in, pick a story or person and dive in over a coffee.

Right now, the EOS is doing its annual Fundraiser, so if you love surfing and have some cash to chip in, now is the time. They have some exciting stuff going on and I firmly believe our $3 a month subscription is one of our most useful subs.

Read a note from Matt on the update below.

Subscribe or gift a sub here and/or donate here.

A letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing.

Hello surfers and all lovers of surf culture. The 2022 Encyclopedia of Surfing fundraiser is ON (December 12 – 21), and if that alone is enough to trigger the philanthropic reflex, click here to donate and here to subscribe or buy a gift sub.

Big plans are afoot for EOS in 2023, and we’ll get to that in a moment, but first a quick look back at 2022.

We promised to go headless, but heads are stubborn things to remove and we’re still three or four months from launching EOS 2.0. The new re-platformed site won’t look much different from what you see today, but the under-the-hood upgrades are huge—more speed, smoother UI, greater flexibility in how and where EOS content can be displayed and, best of all, a new and radically improved search page. More on all of this when 2.0 goes live—I’ll stick my neck out a bit and say March.

The other big event here in 2022 was that, thanks in part to last year’s fundraiser, EOS brought on a new employee—Ella Boyd, recent Scripps College grad (Philosophy, yo!), Malibu regular, and multi-talented creative. Ella has been with EOS since July, mostly working the 2.0 metadata salt mines, but also posting, and her interview with the 90-year-old fireball Vicki Williams is my favorite post of 2022.

Ella has signed on with EOS for next year, joining tech-lord Mark Augias and sage all-arounder Brad Barrett, and this is the strongest team I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

On to the big news for 2023 . . . .

We are finally building EOS Archive. This is a completely new project. A second website. Less glam and less curated than EOS, but probably more important in the long run. The Archive concept is simple. It’s a huge digital library loaded with surf media that’s in danger of disappearing or being forgotten. For years, I’ve wanted to scan and upload all 21 issues of Surf Guide magazine. This will be the first Archive project. For the near term, we’ll continue to focus on print (magazines, books, contest programs), but eventually we will add movies, videos, newsreels, and other watchable media.

The amount of content we’re talking about here, obviously, is mind-blowing. Regular old EOS is big and will continue to grow, but the Archive is orders of magnitude bigger. The goal for 2023 is to just build the platform and figure out the intake and search protocols. The Archive then becomes a group project, as we partner up with, I’m guessing, other like-minded nonprofits and/or colleges and universities.

But it has to start somewhere and some time, and that’ll be here, next year.

EOS Archive has been seeded with a generous grant from the Croul Family Foundation, but the project’s initial development will on how we do with this year’s fundraiser. As always, because EOS’ overhead is low and our marketing and promotion budget is zero, 100% of your 2022 donation money goes toward EOS projects and upkeep. There are still hundreds of pages waiting to be imported from the print version of EOS to the website, and ideally, while I focus this year on the Archive (and keep my side hustle with the Sunday Joint), Ella and Brad and hopefully a player to be named later will collectively work to get that material posted.

Any questions or comments, contact me at matt@eos.surf.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting EOS. We’re going to build the future of surf history!