Last Whole Earth Catalog

Book:	Last Whole Earth Catalog
Author:	Stewart Brand
Honors:	1972 NBA–Current Interest winner Score: 10.22
Genres:	Nonfiction books
Publisher:	Whole Earth

Lots of people think they have the original Whole Earth Catalog, from fall, 1968, somewhere-in their garage or attic, back in the storage shed of the old commune. If you are holding a copy, you have a collector’s item in your hands. There must be some out there, but we only know of two actual copies. Most people who think they own the first edition really have the second, or tenth, or the 1972 Last Whole Earth Catalog. Thirty years ago, WEC was a tool, not a collectible—an L.L. Bean Catalog that proclaimed, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

So to celebrate WEC’s thirtieth anniversary in 1998, we published a full-size facsimile of the original Catalog: every word and every illustration from every review-from Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas and Integrities to The Dome Cookbook to the Hewlett Packard 9100A table-top calculator ($4,900 in 1968 dollars). It’s the same book, down to the funky print quality, except that we updated all the access. If the product was still available, we told readers where to get it now. If it had gone extinct, we pointed to the best replacement we could find.

In addition, we supplemented that Catalog with thirty-two pages of brand-new essays by Whole Earth favorites: Stewart Brand, Jaron Lanier, Lynn Margulis, Kevin Kelly, Mary Catherine Bateson, Andrew Weil, Stephanie Mills, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Peter Coyote, Gary Snyder, Amory Lovins, John and Nancy Jack Todd, Brian Eno, and two dozen others.

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