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Access to Tools ACCESS TO TOOLS AN ESSAY BY DAVID SENIOR Fragments From: Access To... The Note to Librarians was a small entry in the WHOLE EARTH EPILOG I found during the later stages of exhibition research for a small exhibition at the MoMA Li- brary in New York City. In a sense, the note was as concise a curatori- al statement as I could have hoped for in the context of my research. I was assembling books listed in the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, period. The idea was to fill in the story of the CATALOG, its con- tent and its publication history David Senior through a set of books, a library. Part of the story was the condi- tions that allowed a little self-pub- lishing project out a small office in Menlo Park, CA to expand into a major North American cultur- al phenomenon that influenced hundreds of thousands of young minds from the late 60s through the 1970s. Another approach to this story involved drawing out the facets of the CATALOG proj- ect which resembled an alterna- tive library project - a conception of the CATALOG as a reading list Fragments From: Access To... for a coming community, one that the editor/founder, Stewart Brand and his colleagues, conceived as a new kind of educational service and community-in-print. The Dome Cookbook (1968) by builder Steve Baer is a great place to start the discussion of self-pub- lishing and the bibliography of the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s. Baer produced his instruc- tion manual for domes or zomes (his own crystalline structures) by documenting some of his build- David Senior ing projects, like one set within the artists’ community Drop City in Colorado or his own house in Corrales, New Mexico. The publi- cation format was a simple A3 or “tabloid” size document, cheaply off-set printed and staple-bound. The text was type-written as well as annotated with reproduced notes and diagrams. On several pages, Baer outlines the progression of his design timeline with a web of these connecting handwritten notes, outlining his travels, read- ings, influences and reflections of Fragments From: Access To... the success or failure of different building techniques. The format allowed for a broad pictorial de- scription of the projects as well as substantial text, all done in a very direct, casual voice. David Senior Fragments From: Access To... In a description from a sum- mary of the CATALOG’s design – Brand describes the Dome Cook- book in this way: And so, we have the beginning of the format that became so syn- onymous with back-to-the-land David Senior counterculture, alternative press formats and fourth wall-breaking conversation that occurs through- out the publishing history of the Whole Earth Catalog and like- minded publications. The CATA- LOG itself was a publication that talked directly to its readership, asked questions of its readers and completed the feedback loop by publishing readers’ letters, reviews and announcements. When Stew- art Brand founded the CATALOG, he had friends in mind. He was fly- ing back to California from his fa- Fragments From: Access To... ther’s funeral and was struck by an idea for “Access Mobile,” an infor- mation service that would provide information to friends attempt- ing to live on communes about new tools, building and land use designs and general philosophical texts that provided source ideas for potential community building. Quite literally, the first manifesta- tion of the CATALOG was an “Ac- cess Mobile,” a truck packed with books that Stewart Brand and Lois Jennings drove around to com- David Senior munes which they had connec- tions to in New Mexico and Colo- rado in the summer of 1968. They travelled with samples of books that Brand had collected, “a mim- eographed 6-page ‘partial prelimi- nary booklist’ of what I’d gathered so far (Tantra Art, Cybernetics, The Indian Tipi, Recreational Equipment, about 120 items).” It was a bookmobile for self-educa- tion and according to Brand, “did a stunning $200 in business.” Fragments From: Access To... David Senior Fragments From: Access To... In the fall 1968, Stewart Brand, Lois Jennings and a small group of friends produced the first Whole Earth Catalog that codified Brand’s idea of an alternative information service and distribution system. They were supported with office space and equipment by the non- profit educational foundation Por- tola Institute, founded and run by Richard Raymond in Menlo Park, CA. The first CATALOG was pro- duced in an edition of 1000 cop- ies. They were all compiled, edited and “distributed” by Brand and his David Senior assembled team. They mostly sent issues to friends, early subscrib- ers and traded with other publica- tions, like Toronto’s This Magazine is About Schools and Maryland- based Green Revolution. From the beginning, the CATALOG main- tained a consistent mission state- ment for the function and the con- tents of the publication. They also started, in the same shared space with the production offices for the CATALOG, the Whole Earth Truck Store as a shop to browse first-hand some of the items list- Fragments From: Access To... ed in the catalog and used a name that referred back to the original iteration of Brand and Jennings’ bookmobile. David Senior Fragments From: Access To... The format of the catalog, in the spirit of Brand’s original mus- ings, was an information service in regards to the reviewed “tools.” The catalog did not sell things directly, but provided the contact informa- tion for distributors of the materi- als listed. In its content, the CATA- LOG revealed a close connection to the work of writers like Norbert Weiner, Marshall McLuhan and especially Buckminster Fuller, and also, reflected back on the com- munity of readers that informed the conversation that took place in David Senior its pages. The catalog quickly de- veloped into a wide-ranging refer- ence system for designing new en- vironments; whether in relation to new living spaces, sustainable de- sign, experimental media or com- munity practices. The primary is- sues were published biannually between the years 1968-1970 and also produced smaller Supple- ments between the regular issues. The first set of issues were thin, staple-bound catalogs that ranged from forty to sixty pages. After the first years of publication, the cat- Fragments From: Access To... alog exploded in popularity. The most commonly associated for- mat of the CATALOG is the much larger LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG (1972), the LAST (UP- DATED) WHOLE EARTH CAT- ALOG (1974) and the WHOLE EARTH EPILOG (1974). These issues were more sizable tomes, coming in around 300 to 400 plus pages. Random House distributed the LAST issues and they had sev- eral printings through 1974. Dur- ing its years of regular publication, from 1968 to 1975, more than 2.5 David Senior million copies were sold. In 1972 it won a National Book Award. Over this time, Brand became a pub- lic figure and the catalog became synonymous with the back-to- the-land movement and the coun- terculture scene emanating out of the Bay area in California. Brand is often now cited as major influence in the American environmental movement, appropriate technolo- gy discussions, the advent of dig- ital peer-to-peer networks, hacker culture and software development that followed the Whole Earth Fragments From: Access To... community into the 1980s. The CATALOG is also associated with the huge variety of eclectic goods and products and counterculture themes accumulated in the later, massive LAST CATALOGS, but the primary role the CATALOGS and supplements provided was as an alternative library catalog for the counterculture, the bibliogra- phy of experimental “conjuring of new forms” as the CATALOG de- scribes itself in the CATALOG. David Senior Fragments From: Access To... In the early issues and in the activities that led to the first CAT- ALOGS, Stewart Brand’s informa- tion service was constructed pri- marily through the documentation of books and periodicals, manu- als and subscription services. He and other colleagues would mine bookstores, subscribe to services like American Book Buyers As- sociation, and the Books in Print catalog published by R.R. Bowker. He learned and promoted how to locate books, how books were dis- tributed within the United States David Senior and internationally. Many con- tributors to the Supplements to the catalog followed suit and also recommended sources for hard- to-find published material. He was collecting and describing materi- als, which were deemed relevant to his peers or recommended by readers themselves, and CATA- LOG served as the broadcast link for this accumulated information. Brand’s descriptions of books were often funny, casual, emphatic and concise. The tone was hip, bluntly critical of mainstream trends, and Fragments From: Access To... eager to advocate things that fit his rubric of self-education and inde- pendent thought. Brand was pro- viding a bibliographic service for his generation in its own language, while simultaneously instigating a trend towards self-publishing, documenting and promoting ex- perimental publishing projects and the tools involved in produc- ing one’s own publication. David Senior Fragments From: Access To... Like a good librarian, Brand devised subject headings for the content of his CATALOG. The working categories were Under- standing Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics, and Learning. A dense reading list was accumulated in the Whole Systems section – this section served as the philosophi- cal jumping off point for the fol- lowing pages. Buckminster Full- er had the leading role – the first opening pages give a full listing David Senior of his books in print at that point.
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