Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art

Sean Cliver's Disposable is the standard visual history of skateboard graphics, gathering more than 1,000 deck designs from the early 1980s to the start of the 2000s.

Cliver, who drew boards for Powell-Peralta from 1989 and later for World Industries and its offshoots, arranges the graphics chronologically and pairs them with first-hand recollections from the artists and skaters who made and rode them, among them Andy Howell, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. The result is an insider's account of a commercial art form built to be destroyed: decks were printed in short runs, sold, skated and scrapped, and their imagery, from Vernon Courtlandt Johnson's Powell-Peralta skulls to the deliberately crude parodies of the early 1990s, survived mostly in memory and in collectors' garages.

First published in 2004, the book was reissued by Gingko Press in 2007 and again in 2014, and was followed by Cliver's companion volume The Disposable Skateboard Bible (2009). Together they remain the primary reference for a graphic tradition that fed directly into street art, illustration and independent publishing.