Book Review · 31st July 2024

SmörgåsBOARD*

Josh Sutton. Red Fez Books. (150p) ISBN: 9781838342128
SmôrgåsBOARD

SmôrgåsBOARD

I was asked if I would like to read this much earlier this year and to my shame I’d shelved it and completely forgot I had it (it had sneaked onto a shelve of photography books that were low priority reads).

Once I started reading this I found it hard to put down, it was so fascinating.

A brilliant ‘SmörgåsBOARD’ of genres, photography, cook book, travelogue, and memoir come to mind but like all good recipes the completed item is more than just a list of its ingredients. The finished product is enhanced and becomes a thing of its own.

These different worlds are wonderfully intertwined, some of which like travel and cooking I’m highly familiar as I am with the punk aesthetic of just getting on with it and sharing. Some like the actual skateboarding side I’m decades away from remembering anything about this at all (I remember skating on the Livi park after it was built in the early 80s but stopped pretty much after that).

I also remember the ease of getting labourer work in the early 80s for the exact same reasons as Josh, travel.

The stories of building skate parks across the world is so interesting and shows that people from different parts of the world can have great commonality and bond over the simplest of things, fun and food.

Absolutely fascinating read and showed me things I was completely unfamiliar with, but at its heart this is a book of love, a love of food, skateboarding and the culture that is around it, travel, and a very punk mentality.

You can get this at Red Fez Books


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