Inline!: A Manual for Beginning to Intermediate Inline Skating (The William Nealy Collection)

Laugh while you learn basic and advanced techniques for inline skating and rollerblading from an expert and renowned cartoonist!

William Nealy revolutionized learning how to inline skate. Whether you’re a rank beginner or a skating pro, William’s Inline! educates and entertains like no other how-to manual you’ve ever read! His hard-earned crash-and-burn skating experience, four-dimensional drawings, and twisted sense of humor give you the most comprehensive, easy-to-understand, and detailed book on skating ever written.

Inline! teaches you everything you need to know to become a seasoned blader, from taking your first baby steps on blades to more advanced skills such as getting air, descending stairs, expert turning techniques, and more. Inline! also includes chapters on how skates work, skate maintenance, safety, and all the important body armor. Finally, Inline! teaches you the many ways to stop—or safely fall—while you’re climbing the learning curve. All of this is delivered in William’s hilarious, accessible cartoon style.

Inside you’ll find:

• Entertaining and educational content for beginners and experts
• Basic skills to advanced techniques like descending stairs and jumping
• Important information on skate maintenance, safety, and more
• Riotous cartoons that make learning fun!

Whether you’re an armchair skater or a guerrilla blader, this is the book you’ve been waiting for.

William “Not Bill” Nealy was a wild, gentle, brilliant artist and creator turned cult hero who wrote 10 books for Menasha Ridge Press from 1982 to 2000. William shared his hard-won “crash-and-learn” experiences through humorous hand-drawn cartoons and illustrated river maps that enabled generations to follow in his footsteps. His subjects included paddling, mountain biking, skiing, and inline skating. His hand-drawn, poster-size river maps of the Nantahala, Ocoee, Chattooga, Gauley, Youghiogheny, and several other rivers are still sought after and in use today.

William was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He and his wife, Holly Wallace, spent their adult years in a home William built in the woods on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, along with an assortment of dogs, lizards, pigs, snakes, turtles, and amphibians. William died in 2001.

His longtime friend and publisher, Bob Sehlinger, wrote: “When William Nealy died in 2001, paddling lost its Poet Laureate, one of its best teachers, and its greatest icon. William was arguably the best-known ambassador of whitewater sport, entertaining and instructing hundreds of thousands of paddlers through his illustrated books, including the classics: Whitewater Home Companion Volumes I and II, Whitewater Tales of Terror, Kayaks to Hell, and his best-known work, Kayak, which combined expert paddling instruction with artful caricatures and parodies of the whitewater community itself.”