Although I shared these with you during class simply to showcase the contrast in size and the use of negative space, it actually hit me later that you guys may not know about the Whole Earth Catalog! (Did you?) So this magazine is what Steve Jobs called “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along” in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech and where the famous “Stay hungry, stay foolish” was borrowed from. To be more exact, from the back cover of the last issue:
The Whole Earth Catalog was founded by Stewart Brand, published between 1968 and 1972, and it was a lot of things while in the form of a sales catalog: “a how-to manual, a compendium, an enyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers’ recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry.” It is “what came to be the magnum opus of the entire counterculture.”
Chris Anderson, the later editor of Wired, explains the Catalog’s “chain of influence”: “The Whole Earth Catalog inspired the Homebrew Computing Club, who inspired Steve Wozniak to build the Apple 2, who inspired the personal computer movement, who in turn inspired the original web. Who inspired the open-source software movement. Who inspired the open-source hardware movement which inspired the maker movement who inspired me.”
Some pages from the Last Whole Earth Catalog (click to see them bigger):
Notice under purpose: “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”
Which, I think is what we need more than anything now.
You can view the entire issue of the Last Whole Earth Catalog through the Yale Library system. You’ll need to log in with your netID. Here!
Read more about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.
theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog