“You know that job you can’t get?
You didn’t want it anyway.”

A light went on when I first heard this comment. Followed by the comforting thud of things falling into place.

We’d spent the best part of a decade acting on instinct, finding stories we wanted to hear about, talking to people we admired, making a magazine we could believe in and would want to read. At some point over the years we sat up to find ourselves surrounded by like-minds – people who made the the effort to seek out new sources of inspiration, curious enough to question the familiarity that surrounded them, bold enough to build something that challenged what they knew.

But it wasn’t until I heard this comment, from a friend of the magazine who came to us with the clarity of fresh eyes, that I realised why the 18-year-old skate rat who just started his own record label out of his bedroom will forever be bound to the 30-year-old artisan who taught herself how to use power tools so that she could make something beautiful without relying on anyone else; why the surfer photojournalist out on the frontlines, is tied to the bike-obsessed activist typing away at home. Frustration. If there’s one thing that connects us, it’s the frustrated urgency of youth. Pushing beyond the finality of that deadening disbelief that the things we were promised will ever materialise, then waking up to the revelation that we never wanted them all along.

It’s these people that inspire us to keep making Huck. It’s their boundless curiosity that keeps us digging around the underground for untold stories capable of blowing minds. It’s their lifelong desire to keep pushing and learning that forces us to question the perceived way of things. It’s their ability to discern between words of wisdom and bouncy soundbytes that leads us away from the bright lights of transient stars and towards people who work tirelessly at their craft, from filmmakers like Spike Jonze to writers like Douglas Coupland, from artists like Swoon to skateboarders like Mark Gonzales.

This book is dedicated to our readers. And all those angry little sparks who keep us paddling against the flow.

Paddle Against The Flow is available around the world from today March 3 at our online shop in the UK, Chronicle and Urban Outfitters in the US, Chapters Indigo in Canada, Hardie Grant in Australia, Hugendubel in Germany, and Amazon.

Join us for the Paddle Against the Flow launch party at Huck’s 71a Gallery, Leonard Street, London EC2A 4QS, on Thursday March 19, 6-9 pm. RSVP here.

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