I never grew up knowing the Whole Earth Catalog, but in the early '80s I was a precocious elementary school student who practically lived in any library I could get access to. My school library happened to have a copy of a particularly magical book that was loosely patterned after the WEC, the "Kids' Whole Future Catalog". https://paleofuture.com/blog/2007/4/27/the-kids-whole-future...
I obsessively checked it out of the library, pouring over page after page of exciting future and near future advancements, and in my little mind seeing a clear path from the Space Shuttle to the city of the future printed on the cover. It was one of those breathless books that showed humanity figuring out how to engineer every natural process, picture upon picture of far off space stations intermingled with then current hydroponics gardens and concepts well beyond that.
I found myself competing with at least one other child and the book never hit the shelf but for a few minutes as it was almost on permanent loan in somebody's backpack. My mother looked for a few weeks trying to find where to buy it for me, but never found a bookstore with it. It was like an object sent from another dimension, mean to teach children and guide them to an inevitable future Utopia.
It worked. I've worked in technology and R&D my entire career. I've yearned to bring about that future.
A few years ago, thinking back to this formative codex, I went about trying to find it and happened to buy a copy on Ebay which set about a small project to get the equipment together to scan it and put it up on the internet archive as no digital version of the book exists to my knowledge. I'm almost there, but haven't quite gotten everything lined up.
Many years later, I learned about the WEC and it immediately hit me that this was the adult version of the feeder league I had been participating in as a child.
I can't believe the WEC is out there now. I need to get my crap together and get the Kid's Catalog up as well.
I have a similar story about a set of books from the 80s that weren't as much as inspiration for me and the future, but instead became a major source of forming my own broad general knowledge on core topics: Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia.
Every week, at the local grocery store, a new volume would be available for purchase, covering a new subject area (Anatomy, Animals, Aircraft, Watercraft, Electricity, Space, Weather, etc.). I was obsessed. I re-read all 15 of them countless times.
30+ years later, I bought a set off ebay in great shape to read with my kids. Seeing the diagrams and pictures I realized it was the source of many of the facts I know today.
You never know what's going to have an impact on your kids helping them realize what they are (going to be) interested in!
I had the Marshall Cavendish Tree of Knowledge - a collectible encyclopedia week by week.
This is one of the few areas where paper really wins. You get concentrated information in one physical object with hard boundaries which arrives on a regular slow schedule. You have plenty of time to read it thoroughly and start thinking and imagining.
The web is a constant hurricane of distractions. Wikipedia has far more information than any paper encyclopedia, and in a superficial sense it's far more accessible. But there's always more, and always something else. You firehose it, forget most it, and don't get the bigger picture or the implied narrative linking everything together.
I had the same thought. I initially believed that the Web would be the replacement for the Catalog, but it really isn't - it lacks curation. I've never really found any place on the Web with a similar level of curation; maybe OpenCulture, but even that's kind of a firehose. If anyone knows of any places out there, I'd love to hear recommendations.
There's another benefit of an encyclopedia set of books over Wikipedia: in the physical process of looking up a desired topic in a book, you can stumble upon COMPLETELY unrelated topics as you flip through the pages. This serendipitous effect led to reading random encyclopedia articles for HOURS as a kid, an interaction that's hard to replicate with Wikipedia today. Sure there's Wikipedia:Random [0], but you have to intentionally access it.
Full disclosure, they're from the 80s so they're out of date on some topics (space, aircraft, etc.) and there's some occasional insensitive language, e.g. "stupid".
I'd love to see it. I had a set of similar books I would pore through as a child like 'Future Cities'[1]. I think it might have been part of a series as well. There was also this big thick book from Readers Digest that had all kinds of things you could build Model boats and Planes (among other things). It's not the 'Crafts and Hobbies' one that's on the internet archive, but it was similar.
The entire Usborne series of books was eye-opening to me when I was a kid: the future, how to be a spy, science experiments. They were translated to Spanish by Editorial Plesa.
Similar story : Growing up , my mother bought us an encyclopedia set (in Spanish) hardcover set with blue covers , where each volume was named after a question, and there were at least 8 with names like:
What?
When?
How?
Why?
Who?
Where?
etc
The questions would range from the "how do planes fly" , to "who discovered gunpowder?". They would have illustration, which was super helpful to picture steam power, and the Cretacean period duration relative to other periods, etc. It was all in color so I suspect they have aged well. I remember coming back to certain questions over and over. Some that I still remember - "When did the universe begin?" "What happened to the dinosaurs?".
IN short I cannot recommend this set enough. I tried to google, I'll need to come back and post it once I find the original that is hanging out at a relative's library.
beautiful reminiscence - my question is: where do people influenced by this stuff collect? I suppose its everywhere - you get those once in a blue moon encounters (hello to chap I met in Bulgaria who was travelling around the MIddle East learning the Oud and would regail tales of late 80s / early 90s san francisco). I'm in Europe - a bit dissatisfied - but buzzing.
There are 82 items in the collection, you could do a little scraping and run all the downloads through uGet or similar download manager.
Plus, each item has an auto-generated torrent. They aren't very fast generally, but you could theoretically seed the directly downloaded files if you were interested in helping distribute this.
During 1968 through 1972 I lived a block and a half from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Truck store, across the street from Kepler's Bookstore, and around the corner from the Mid Peninsula Free University. There hasn't been a time like that since, and I didn't know what I had until it was gone.
"It wasn't better back then, you were just younger".
The nature of the delights may have shifted, but the delights are still here. I was a teenager in the UK with my transatlantic subscription to CoEvolution Quarterly, weekly trips to Compendium Books in Camden and yeah, it seems like a better time. But I was just younger. Now I have Bandcamp and teh interwebz.
WEC: Eye-opener. Lot of fun to order exotic stuff (tools, foods, materials, clothing) from. A few for-examples: it got me to cane a seat on a (once-expensive) thrift-shop store ... and try some east-coast kinnikinic ... order tea from Canada (Merchies, still there) ... and a lot of previously unseen books (including Lloyd Kahn's). The cool comments (and stories) around the page-edges were a plus too.
Talking about paving paradise, Kepler's is now a huge multi-story store. Several decades ago I looked in vain for even a little table or shelf with leading-edge counter-culture literature. Couldn't find anything resembling that.
> Talking about paving paradise, Kepler's is now a huge multi-story store.
Unless there's another book store called Kepler's I'm not familiar with, it isn't. The building is multiple stories, but Kepler's is only on the first floor (and even there, it isn't the only tenant). The upper stories are unrelated office space.
All that hippie stuff was never hard enough to actually counter the culture. It capitulated to "the man," and now we've got Amazon and SUVs. You're not going to find CrimethInc in Menlo Park.
"didn't know what I had till it was gone" is a standard phrase meaning "I didn't realize how much I appreciated it till I didn't have it any more"
"They took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum / And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em / Don't it always seem to go / You don't know what you've got till it's gone / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot" -- Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwUJH70ubM
Whole Earth Catalog and Fox Fire books were like maker bibles for me when I was a kid. Nothing quite compares to them now days. Fox Fire books in particular were non-commercial (from my memory) and full of really interesting skills and information. They were the maker movement before it was a (tech/online) thing.
I read every single word of this catalog starting the day it was released in 1968, just after I turned 20.
In one of the many biographies of Steve Jobs I've read since, he remarked that he read every word of it when it came out. He was 13 years old at the time.
About time! For years I would try to visit the Whole Earth website and be met with a barrage of PHP errors. How could a magazine which was so formative for the likes of Steve Jobs be so broke that they couldn't put their archive online properly? Still don't get what happened but happy to see someone's sorted this out.
Whatever else the Energy Crisis may mean,
one thing is certain, prices of everything will
continue to rise. When the economy is
berserk the sane citizen will participate
minimally. For city dwellers this is the best
book on acquiring that skill. Living Poor
and Living with Style are far from a
contradiction in terms both consist of
a loving (slightly detached) attention to
detail. Here are 600 pages of intelligent
detail for $1.95."
Does anybody also remember the Loompanics [1] book catalog? After the Last Whole Earth Catalog went away, I found even browsing through the titles in Loompanics a mind-altering experience.
Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.
I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.
While this is amazing, I wonder if there is any modern print book series or magazine series that comes close. I'd love to share this with my kids, but digital format is not ideal. Any suggestions (in EN but also any other major European languages in my case).
Nice job Barry!!!! I love it when I fall out of touch with friends for about a decade, then hear of them in headlines. Man, that was a fun party (2008).
These magazines were beautiful. It's a shame that little on the web can compete with them on that front. The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension was a fair crack, when it first came out, but that analogue look, with real human artwork is loads better.
Well, except for all the nonsense about ESP and the like. Stewart Brand and friends were ahead of the world in a lot of ways, such as realizing the need to reduce our ecological footprint and so on, but they were also unfortunately suckers for "paranormal" con-artists and other "New Age" nonsense that the 60s counterculture also was intrigued by.
"The Fringes of Reason" uses a lot of questions and quote marks but it looks to be a pretty breathless extolling of all things mystic. If you want to defend the writing style there, you're at the same time defending Ancient Aliens "Might there be an extraterrestrial connection behind the secrets of the pyramids?"
For example, they were really into Georgi Lozanov's "Super learning" which on the surface simply seems like a memorization technique to help learn things like foreign language vocabulary like are common now with tools like Anki, but Lozanov was also a self-described "parapsychologist" who believed that such techniques would expand human capabilities and allow clairvoyance!
Yes, those were the last words of Steve Jobs' commencement speech which I quoted above, and he said he quoted it from the Whole Earth Catalog, which he mentioned just prior, in the talk. He had read one of the original editions, since he grew up in that area in those days.
And the video of Steve's talk was shared with me soon after it happened, by an older relative, who, ironically, was a top exec at a very large company, which was kind of the antithesis of what Steve was advocating that day.
It was never really a mail order catalog in the sense that there was no single place to order the stuff (the Whole Earth store did open later, but it just a slice of what appeared in the WEC and CoEvolution Quarterly). It was, as others have noted, reviews of "good stuff" and info on how (maybe) to get it.
That came later, when they opened the store. It only applied to stuff they decided to carry, though given that they reviewed it in print that was likely because the reviews were almost all positive.
No problem! Lucky for us they uploaded all the issues of the catalog. : )
If you look on the Wikipedia page there were a few related physical stores over the years:
> the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the "Whole Earth Truck Store" which was a 1963 Dodge truck. In 1968, Brand, who was then 29, and his wife Lois embarked "on a commune road trip" with the truck, hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs. The truck was not only a store, but also an alternative lending library and a mobile microeducation service.
> In 1969, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with) The Whole Earth Catalog, called the Whole Earth Access opened in Berkeley, California. It closed in 1998. In 1970 a store called the "Whole Earth Provision Co.", inspired by the catalogue, opened in Austin, Texas.[27] It has six stores in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.
The Whole Earth was never really anti-capitalist. Rather Brand and company leveraged the ideas early cybernetics research to build loose networks of engaged individuals with the goal of creating their own centers of power and authority in society and the economy.
> The Whole Earth Catalog preached self-reliance, teaching young baby boomers how to build their own cabins, garden sheds, and geodesic domes after they had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out—well before they grew wealthy enough to buy up all the three-bedroom single-family homes.
What a great punch line. Worth reading the whole article.
I obsessively checked it out of the library, pouring over page after page of exciting future and near future advancements, and in my little mind seeing a clear path from the Space Shuttle to the city of the future printed on the cover. It was one of those breathless books that showed humanity figuring out how to engineer every natural process, picture upon picture of far off space stations intermingled with then current hydroponics gardens and concepts well beyond that.
I found myself competing with at least one other child and the book never hit the shelf but for a few minutes as it was almost on permanent loan in somebody's backpack. My mother looked for a few weeks trying to find where to buy it for me, but never found a bookstore with it. It was like an object sent from another dimension, mean to teach children and guide them to an inevitable future Utopia.
It worked. I've worked in technology and R&D my entire career. I've yearned to bring about that future.
A few years ago, thinking back to this formative codex, I went about trying to find it and happened to buy a copy on Ebay which set about a small project to get the equipment together to scan it and put it up on the internet archive as no digital version of the book exists to my knowledge. I'm almost there, but haven't quite gotten everything lined up.
Many years later, I learned about the WEC and it immediately hit me that this was the adult version of the feeder league I had been participating in as a child.
I can't believe the WEC is out there now. I need to get my crap together and get the Kid's Catalog up as well.