We first met Kevin in 2016 when we visited his home in San Diego. He had just started his Look Back Library project, organizing thousands of old skateboard magazines with a goal to build publicly accessible skate mag libraries around the globe.
Now, Kevin has taken his project on the road, driving around to skate shops, gathering mag donations at each stop, and building free libraries across the U.S. (as well as in a few other countries). To date he’s built 80 different libraries.
Kevin’s project is half green initiative — giving second lives to old magazines that might otherwise end up in a landfill — and half utter dedication to skate history. And to get it done, he more or less lives out of his trusty blue van for most of the year, sleeping on a bed above crates of more Skateboarders, Thrashers, and indie mags than we’ve ever seen.
We caught up with Kevin at the halfway point of a six-month long trek across the U.S., when he was setting up a library at KCDC skate shop in Brooklyn. We were curious what it was like to live in that van with only mags to keep him company, so he gave us a tour and told us about life on the road.
If you want to meet Kevin along his journeys, check his calendar to see if he’s coming to your local for a drop-off/build.
He’s always accepting donations, so if you have any mags buried in your mom’s basement you can bug him to coordinate a pick-up and keep the libraries coming.
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July 13, 2019 9:24 am
yo did he set up the library in southbay skateshop?? i seen a library inna there that looks exactly the same.