Late last month the Noosa Surf Museum at Tewantin took delivery of the world’s largest collection of surfing literature, a prize coveted by surf collectors around the world, but one that has sat in more than 400 boxes stacked floor to ceiling in a two-car garage on the Central Coast of NSW for decades.
More than 19,640 magazines across 600 titles from 41 countries covering more than six decades of surfing history since the first editions of specific surf titles began popping out of California and East Coast Australia at the dawn of the 1960s, plus a sizeable collection of books of surf fiction, guides, histories and biographies, and a secondary collection of double-up copies which, at more than 5000 magazines, is probably the world’s second biggest collection.
The collection first went to market in early 2020, just as Covid kicked in, with an asking price of $US200,000.
There was a flurry of interest from collectors in the US and Australia, but most wanted to buy full sets of particular magazines, like Surfer (1960-2019) or Surfing World (established 1962 and still going), but collection owner Al Hunt was adamant – the world’s greatest surfing reference library was too important to split.
Al stuck to his guns and his garage remained full until two weeks ago, when a very large removals truck deposited the collection at entrepreneur and collector Keith Grisman’s Noosa Surf Museum.
The sale, negotiated over the winter, was for an undisclosed price but Noosa Today believes it was just in excess of $100,000.
Al Hunt, now 72, was just a teenager and promising surfer from Sydney’s North Narrabeen when he drove to Bells Beach in Victoria for the annual Easter surf contest in 1966, sitting in the back seat of film-maker and publisher Bob Evans’ station wagon, where his feet rested on boxes of Evans’ magazine, Surfing World.
Perhaps feeling guilty about stealing Al’s leg space, Evans told him to take a copy of each edition. Al Hunt spent the rest of the 10-hour journey devouring every page. A collection that would become an obsession had begun.
By the end of the ‘70s Hunt had forsaken his surf star ambitions for a more assured career path on the administrative side of surfing’s new professional organisation and world tour, first with the International Professional Surfers agency run out of Hawaii, then with the California-based Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) which grew the tour for more than 30 years, prior to a takeover in 2013 by media billionaire Dirk Ziff, who founded the World Surf League.
Judge, administrator, statistician and go-to guy as required, Hunt was along for the ride for more than 40 years of dedicated service, which has seen him honoured by several surfing territories since his retirement in 2020, most recently adding his footprints to the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame in California.
Travelling the world as a professional surfing administrator also put him in the perfect position to stitch up deals with surf magazine publishers as they popped up – a free subscription in return for instant access to results and stats as they happened and historically.
As surf media grew like Topsy, right up to the dotcom collapse at the turn of the century, Al had more than 70 magazines a month arriving in his letterbox, while everywhere he travelled on the pro tour, he met more media moguls who wanted to fill his bags with their latest editions.
Quite apart from the prohibitive cost of buying every magazine published, no other collector was in the right place at the right time as often as Al Hunt.
But interestingly, as the collection grew, he became more detached from it.
Returning home from pro events in Brazil or Tahiti, usually exhausted, Hunt would have to work his way through 100 magazines he’d brought home, plus another 100 subscription copies that had arrived in his absence, painstakingly scanning covers and entering the content details on the collection’s website, allsurfmagazines.com.
But he never had time to glance at a copy, let alone read it.
While Al tells me this on his arrival in Noosa to help bed the collection down in its new home, as a minor league surf collector and sometime buyer and seller myself, I suddenly realise the enormity of responsibility for a collection this vast and this important, at least in our shared world of surfing.
“You know,” he says, “probably about half the collection is brand new, copies never opened.”
Al doesn’t add the obvious corollary of “and never read” but that’s what I’m thinking.
After years of thinning my own substantial collection by selling and donating, what’s left lives in a storage shed far from my gaze, but I cherish the days that the American publication, Surfer’s Journal, shows up at my post box, and I read it cover to cover despite the increasing number of friend’s obituaries that fill the back pages.
Half the world’s biggest surf magazine collection going unread tugs at my heart strings. Perhaps it’s a retirement project.
Meanwhile, neither Al Hunt nor his long-suffering wife are shedding tears.
They’ve reclaimed their garage (although a few cars on, Al has discovered that this one doesn’t quite fit) and the living room that had become the collection’s office.
“I can still use the space,” Al laughs.
“But it’s a relief for both of us, because if I happened to die my wife and kids would have no idea what to do with it. This way, it will be available for viewing and research.”
Noosa Surf Museum will be announcing details about research access, once the Al Hunt Collection has been integrated.
