The whole of the Whole Earth Catalog is now online
wired.com
wired.com
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.
It’s on the Internet Archive! :D
[1]: https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/03/04/usborne-publishing-th...
https://bookreviewers.online/2018/07/17/things-to-make-and-d...
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!
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.
N.B. There are many used sets available on eBay/Poshmark/Mercari/Amazon etc.
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.
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I wonder if there's a torrent download of the entire archive.. Looks like this is pretty close:
The Internet Archive's Whole Earth collection (98.5 GB) - https://archive.org/details/wholeearth
The submitted URL was https://wholeearth.info/, and is obviously worth looking at.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...
https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/...
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.
In a lot of ways, it seems our simulation truly began in 1970.
How cute, heh.
The current state of online publishing paints a grim picture for the future of the internet :o(
https://wholeearth.info/p/the-fringes-of-reason?format=sprea...
steve jobs commencement speech at stanford univ 2005.
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.
https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc?si=vk4WlUG5XkCANpXN
At around 13m10s.
The Whole Earth Magazine seems much more interesting than the Catalog
A ton of items also say "OR Whole Earth Catalog" which I think implies you could send the money to WEC and they would make the order for you?
https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-catalog-spring-1970?fo...
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.
What a great punch line. Worth reading the whole article.