The Next Whole Earth Catalog

A book with Africa “upside down” on the cover – how could I resist?

“The Next Whole Earth Catalog” (1980), edited by Stewart Brand, was the 1980 edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog” (1968-98). It had everything from pitchforks to computers, from Clown College to Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Ecotopia: The idea of the Whole Earth catalogues, as I understood it, was that it had everything you would need to start a hippie commune. It was very back-to-the-land and save-the-earth. But, at least by 1980, it also believed in better living through technology, like solar panels and personal computers. It was Thoreau meets Buckminster Fuller. Its leanings were towards Zen Buddhism and functioning grass-roots anarchism.

Audience: As Brand tells it, by 1980 he hoped to broaden his audience from just “the menstrual blood painters of the late ’60s and early ’70s” to “the vast citizenry” of do-it-yourselfers. I was neither but I loved it because it was full of stuff not touched on at school, on television or during parental lectures.

Supply chain: Brand saw his catalogue as informing the citizenry of the good stuff that was out there, like good-quality hammers that might cost a little more or good books that do not get reviewed because they are no longer new. He was trying to jump past the “fast-buck, quantity-kills-quality” supply chains of North America.

I adored its short book reviews, which filled much of the catalogue. Its range of books was much wider and deeper and better than, yes, what was being pushed at me by those North American supply chains.

An example: Here is the beginning of one review (the original image was in black-and-white and angled so you could tell it was a book):

Walden

This edition is the one, I believe, that Thoreau would have bought. It costs a buck fifty. The prime document of America’s 3rd Revolution, now in progress. – SB

Walden
(and “Civil Disobedience”)
Henry David Thoreau
1954; 256 pp.

$1.50 postpaid from:
New American Library, Inc.
P.O. Box 120
120 Woodbine
Bergenfield, NJ 07621

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positiive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.”

That is followed by four more excerpts from the book. Most book reviews followed that format.

Some of the books it recommended that I read, in whole or in part:

• Thoreau: Walden
• Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed
• Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Paul Feyerbend: Against Method
• Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society
• W.H. McNeil: The Rise of the West
• Joseph Needham: Science and Civilization in China
• Gerard K. O’Neill: The High Frontier

The last one is about Lagrangian space colonies, the very sort that billionaire Jeff Bezos is now pushing.

Format: The catalogue was like a website in printed form in terms of layout, design and browsability – 11 years before there were any websites, and some 20 years before websites began to reach its level.

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

• books
• Sears catalogue
• The Eleven Nations of North America
  • Ecotopia / Left Coast
    • Steve Jobs – a fan of the Whole Earth catalogues
    • damali ayo
    • Jimi Hendrix
    • In memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin
    • Stewart Brand
• The whole earth
  • Apollo 8 – this post has a Stewart Brand quote
  • The oneness of mankind
• Jeff Bezos
• Thomas Kuhn
• Thoreau’s library
• How to find a good book: the 15 Year Rule – more on the books of 1980
• al-Idrisi – yet more “upside-down” Africa
• The lost book covers of 1981 – some other books I had then which now are lost