On First Looking into Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog
Monday, January 20, 2025
My favorite browsing lately is at a charity bookshop in my neighborhood – it only accepts donations of books, no purchases, and gives all proceeds in turn to a college scholarship fund.
Part of what I enjoy about this bookshop is the glimpse it gives inside the libraries and attics and basements (and probably self-storage units) of my neighbors. The median age of donors is clear from the sorts of titles on the shelves - when I first started frequenting the shop, there were many stolid hardcovers from the 1940s and 50s, alongside an occasional deep dive into the earlier decades of the 20th century. But the profile of the stock has steadily changed, and at present it is dominated by trade paperbacks from those formally educated in the 60s (philosophy and lit crit bear this out in particular), coming of age in the 70s (politics, religion, sociology), setting up house in the 80s (cooking), keeping up with culture as defined by art, fiction and music through the 90s (there’s a lot of world music among the CDs), and consistently enticed in this century by retrospective looks at the youth culture of their past (any given book about Bob Dylan is likely to be in stock at any given time).
So it made perfect sense when I spotted a copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) on the shop’s backroom table, awaiting shelving in part because no one was sure where to put it. I’d never actually seen a proper copy of this oversized, newsprint mail-order catalog, though I knew it by reputation as a publication that had helped define a generation.
Stewart Brand’s catalog was a bible for hippie independent living close to the land. Paradoxically, it foretold today’s Silicon Valley tech billionaire broligarchy. Brand has always been comfortable with Big Business and big capital.
One of my college roommates had a copy of one of the editions of the catalog, published as a nice trade paperback, and I was fascinated by it and pored over it again and again.