By Jena Gilbert-Merrill, WPAMC Class of 2022
Overview
Figure 1. Cover image of 1971 LWEC. Winterthur Research Library, TS199 W62 F.
The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was a publication that existed in its original form from 1968 to 1971. It was conceived of by a writer, biologist, veteran, and artist named Stewart Brand, and published through the Portola Institute, an organization in Menlo Park, CA that produced alternative educational materials. The Catalog sprung from the context of the late 1960s counterculture movement — the confluence of the Civil Rights movement, anti-Viet Nam War protest, the free speech movement, second wave feminism, and the burgeoning environmental movement set the stage for the generation that increasingly viewed the government and the previous generations’ system of values as oppressive. This new hippie generation that the Catalog came out of and catered to no longer trusted “the man” and wanted to imagine an alternate future, a simpler, peaceful, sustainable life of self-reliance and anti-consumerism. The WEC was a response to the social and political context of the late 1960s in that it existed to connect people directly to tools and resources, thereby subverting “the system” by enabling people to empower themselves to achieve and become something beyond what they were at that time.
Figure 2. Inner cover of the LWEC. The bottom left corner lists that the copyright is owned by the Portola Institute Inc. but also that this edition was distributed by Random House.
The WEC consisted of book and product reviews, articles, and how-to guides, and combined text with photographic images as well as illustrations, all in a hefty, oversized book that one could use to find a loom, read about farm equipment, build a geodesic dome, or ponder the universe — essentially, to conduct your own learning in practical as well as philosophical matters. It served as a guidebook for communal living and back-to-the-landers, a practical compendium of resources, but also as an idealistic object through which readers could imagine new ways of living and being in the world. After the Catalog’s initial four-year run, the publication expanded drastically, encouraging individuals to create their own offshoot books and catalogs, and itself evolving into a handful of related environmentalist publications that quickly grew into early computer and tech culture. The WEC in some ways packaged and presented a counterculture lifestyle, over time developing its own cultural currency as an object as much as it was intended to be a practical resource, offering “access to tools,” both literal and figurative. The unique materiality of the Catalog itself, as well as of the publications that sprung from it, reflects the ideologies that brought it into being as well as the way it was meant to be used and interacted with.
Format and Material Anomalies
Figure 3. Procedure page listed at the beginning of the LWEC. Lays out some information on how to use the Catalog, and introduces the striped ball which is used as a size reference, as well as the beginning of the serialized novel, Divine Right’s Trip.
The format of the WEC is similar to a traditional mail-order catalog in that it is a collection of items listed in a book that one can read about, look at pictures of, and order through the mail. It was explicitly based on the L.L. Bean Catalog, but also recalls popular catalogs such as the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs in its formatting. However, the WEC is anomalous even from those earlier catalogs in some of the peculiarities of its layout, structure, and materiality, but above all, for its ideological underpinnings and its relationship to the context out of which it emerged.
The WEC is a large book, with its oversized pages measuring 11” x 14.5”. It was printed on newsprint with a thin paperboard cover, and as the length of the publication increased over time, the binding method shifted from staple binding to adhesive binding to accommodate more pages within. The catalog was printed on this oversized paper for reasons of economy, the paper size and type being less expensive than a heavier-weight paper. While this large format initially made bookstores reluctant to carry the WEC, over time it proved to be effective, as the catalog did so well that the 1971 Last Whole Earth Catalog (LWEC) was distributed by Random House Inc. and won a National Book Award in 1972. The catalog became large and heavy, and with its black cover dramatically accentuated by a color picture of the Earth taken from outer space, it announces itself as an object and is immediately recognizable.
The contents of the WEC are organized by category, and these categories consist of: Whole Systems, Land Use, Shelter, Industry, Craft, Community, Nomadics, Communications, and Learning. The books, products, and information listed within are grouped into these sections based on their use or content, so the Catalog’s general organizational schema is structured according to subject and information, rather than alphabetically by name or type of object, as one might find in a more traditional catalog.
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Figure 4. Two adjacent pages from the Craft section of the LWEC.
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Figure 5. Two adjacent pages from the Community section of the LWEC.
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Figure 6. Page from the Nomadics section of the LWEC. This page introduces the section and features a slightly longer article and adjusted page layout.
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Figure 7. Two adjacent pages from the 1968 WEC. Note the curved lines separating sections on the page, as well as the ovals that photographs are placed within. The page structure is similar to the 1971 edition but the visual vocabulary used to organize it is different.
This system that privileges information above all is apparent in the way the Catalog’s pages are laid out as well (see above image gallery). On each page one can find a combination of text and images (photographs, illustrations, diagrams), with articles on a given item separated by a thin, meandering, black line. The weight and quality of the lines separating articles also changed over time, becoming more refined and regular by 1971’s LWEC. On many pages, there are also editorial blurbs boxed off with a thick, black, dotted line. In the 1971 edition, at the bottom righthand corner of every righthand page is also a section delineated by a thin line that is rounded at the corner and contains a small image of a crocodile as well as the text from a novel called Divine Right’s Trip that is serialized throughout the pages of the catalog. There is no universal pattern of layout, but rather each page is organized according to the information presented and the space it takes up on the page — this means that every page looks different and has the feeling of being collaged together, with the box around each article making the whole page fit together like a puzzle. The WEC’s layout, in terms of sections as well as individual pages, makes the book suited both to being searchable as well as browsable.
One of the WEC’s most significant anomalies that relates to both its form and function is an article at the back of the 1971 Last WEC entitled “How to do a Whole Earth Catalog.” These few pages tie together the catalog’s content, context, and material form. This article details the steps involved in producing the WEC, and it describes the research, review, editing, layout, and printing processes as well as the financials, all the way down to the IBM Selectric Composer that was used for type-set and the Polaroid MP-3 Camera used for much of the photography (Last WEC, p. 435-441). The reference to its own making is unique and anomalous in its own right, but the goal of this article is in line with the WEC’s tagline “access to tools” – the history and production process are detailed here in order to give the reader the ability to embody the catalog’s philosophy and make their own books. This article opens up and democratizes the potential of the WEC moving forward, contributing to the openness of the catalog’s materiality and content, as well as the dissipated author- and ownership that it possessed from its inception. In this way, the WEC, in its form and the ways it shifted and expanded over time, embodies a kind of material flexibility, a willingness to become something else, and this quality is embedded in the form, layout, and general materiality of the book itself.
Figure 8. Two adjacent pages from the Communications section of the LWEC. These pages are particularly relevant in terms of the Catalog’s anomalous qualities, as they relay information on bookmaking, thereby relating to the “How to Do a Whole Earth Catalog” article at the end of this edition and referencing itself as a book and object.
Typography
The WEC uses a number of fonts, as well as italics and boldface. Different fonts and formats convey different types of information, or information from different sources. Univers, a sans-serif typeface that was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1953, makes up the bulk of the text in the WEC. Reviews and recommendations are presented in italics, and occasionally text is presented in a handful of serif fonts, often when a book is quoted. Another, more graphic font called Windsor is used in headings. The combination of Univers and Windsor lend the typography a distinctly 1960s-70s aesthetic and aura, as these fonts were used widely during this time period and popularized in large part due to publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog.
Collectors and Collections
The Whole Earth Catalog is certainly a collectable item and there are modern day collectors, but many people have also held onto their copies from the initial time of publication. Copies from different years of publication can be found for auction online, but a number of editions have also been scanned and are available for free on online archives, and Stanford University has a large Whole Earth Catalog collection that was donated by Stewart Brand. Spinoff publications, such as The First New England Catalog and Rainbook: Resources for Appropriate Technology, which resulted from the 1971 “How to Do a Whole Earth Catalog” are also collectible items. While the WEC contains a huge amount of useful information, at this point in time it is valued and collected more for its cultural signification than for the information contained within.
Diagram of The Whole Earth Catalog
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Exterior diagram of the Whole Earth Catalog
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Interior diagram of the Whole Earth Catalog
Glossary of Terms
An ideology that runs counter to the idea of consumerist and capitalist behavior and values, which involves continual purchasing and consumption of goods. In the case of the WEC, anti-consumerism was an important component of the 1960s counterculture movement.
The process by which a process, product, or idea is made accessible to all people. The WEC sought to democratize information and resources, thereby giving readers access to tools that would be useful to their lives as independent doers, thinkers, and learners.
Annotated Bibliography
This article gives an overview of the WEC’s background and history, but also focuses on the publications referenced within or that sprang from the WEC. It details some of the publications that the WEC collected and promoted in its pages, and lists a number of other books and catalogs that were inspired by the Catalog. It conveys the connectedness and broad reach of the WEC during its original four-year run, as well as after it ceased to exist as such.
Full Citation: “Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974.” MoMA.org, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoTools/.
Bonnano briefly attends to the WEC in her thesis on ecology in print media. This mention of the Catalog gets at the influence that the WEC had within the broader world of print, as Bonnano notes that the rebranding of a publication called Picturesque California as West of the Rocky Mountains took inspiration from the materiality of the WEC, notably in terms of its size, which mimicked the oversized dimensions of the Whole Earth Catalog. Therefore, the WEC’s materiality and format were notable and influential on the broader world of counterculture print media at the time.
Full Citation: Bonnano, Katie. “Ecology in Print Media: Publishing Picturesque California, 1887-1976.” Master’s thesis. University of Delaware and Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. 2016. https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/19902.
This contemporaneous New York Times article by Peter Collier gives a great description of the ineffable qualities of the WEC, what it physically was as well as what it represented and accomplished. The article’s colloquial tone does a good job of conveying the feeling of the WEC. This small passage from the beginning of the article says a lot about the unique position that the WEC occupies: “It is basically indefinable, but less a book than an artifact or a happening. This is one of those rare items that is pretty much what you want it to be and gives the illusion of adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Poised between the ecology movement and the cultural revolution, the catalog has clearly struck very rich vein, becoming far and away the most successful publishing venture in the brief history of the counterculture.”
Full Citation: Collier, Peter. “Drop‐Out's How‐To.” The New York Times, March 7, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/03/07/archives/dropouts-howto-dropouts-howto.html.
In this book, Kirk looks at the unique and nascent environmentalism that the WEC promoted and disseminated. In the introduction, he explains the individual materiality of the catalog – “too big to fit on any normal shelf, about the size of a road atlas but five times as thick” (Kirk, p. 2) — as well as indefinable position that the WEC occupied and continues to occupy with respect to categorization. While this book itself focuses on explaining the WEC’s “genuinely holistic and human-centered environmental pragmatism,” Kirk uses a few paragraphs of the introduction to detail the contents, cover, layout, size, and heft of the catalog. He also touches on the ways its physical characteristics evolved over the course of its original four-year existence and as it shifted to become the separate but related publications, CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Review, and mentions the spinoff publications that emerged in imitation of or inspiration from the WEC.
This book is a collection of select articles from the 1971 Last Whole Earth Catalog and the preface and introduction outline useful contextual information on the catalog, as well as insights into its production and materiality. The articles and interviews quoted from Stewart Brand, the WEC’s founder, are especially useful and revealing of the back end operations of the Catalog, in terms of its philosophy as well as the nitty-gritty of putting it together.
Markoff explains the origins of the WEC and gives some background about its founder Stewart Brand, his Midwestern roots, his time in the army, and his artistic and activist work. He also discusses the roles of the Portola Institute and its director, Dick Raymond, in the Catalog’s founding and operation. Markoff explains the culture and influence of Portola during the late 1960s, as well as its connection to early computer culture in Silicon Valley and the instrumental role that Raymond played in the WEC’s founding. He touches on the development and evolution of the catalog through the 1970s, and traces Brand’s projects and influence up to the present day.
Full Citation: Markoff, John. “Access to Success.” Alta Online, December 10, 2018, https://altaonline.com/access-to-success/.
Morrall offers more on the origins of the WEC and Brand himself, but she also discusses the importance of Buckminster Fuller as the “visionary” whose ideas bolster the Catalog’s philosophical underpinnings. This blogpost contains snippets from an interview and information about Carol Goodell, who was a contributor to the WEC and discusses some of the everyday realities and operations involved in the creation and publication of the WEC and of the Portola Institute.
Full Citation: Morrall, June. “1968: Whole Earth Catalog Is Born.” Half Moon Bay Memories, June 2, 2008, https://www.halfmoonbaymemories.com/2008/06/01/1968-whole-earth-catalog-is-born/.
Erin Schreiner seems to be one of very few scholars who has worked with the WEC and has focused on its materiality. She is a bibliographer, as well as a collector of the catalog and its offshoot publications, and in this blogpost she focuses on the “bibliographic and book historical implications of the Whole Earth Catalog’s success,” arguing that the annotations, supplements, and editorial aspects of the WEC and Stewart Brand’s bibliographical impulses are what make this publication unique and important. This post served as a major jumping-off point in my investigation of the catalog.
Full Citation: Schreiner, Erin. “Hippie Bibliography.” JHI Blog, January 20, 2016, https://jhiblog.org/2016/01/18/hippie-bibliography/.
