W.E.C.

I came upon my old copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalogue (1971) and I couldn't not pick it up and do some page flipping. About 440 pages (the original Catalogue in 1968 had 64 pages), oversize, black print on what were once fairly white pages but are now brittle and flaxen in tone, especially around the edges.

It was an amazing collection of tools and information on an indescribably large array of subjects, and it really put the world at your fingertips, or at least made it readily available via the U.S. Post Office. You could order wheels and tires for your motorcycle, or a book on intelligent life in the universe by Carl Sagan. You could order instructions on how to build a windmill, or just buy a windmill itself. Moog synthesizers. Geodesic domes. Books on language. The Art and Practice of Hawking. Woks. Anvils. Boat toilets. Spinning wheels. It's all there. Not just the products themselves (which you generally ordered from other sources, not the WEC), but a seemingly infinite number of sketches, photos, figures, descriptions, testimonies, addresses, listings, all assembled in a way that resulted in no two pages being laid out alike. Sometimes there were random associated notes like, "Warning: funky generators eat fan motors," from the section on giant inflatable structures. It had many letters from readers and users, one of my favorites being from a guy who claimed he cured his warts with a swiss army knife and voodoo: "They now have more or less disappeared leaving only gaping holes and volcano-like craters on my calouses...."

The catalogue was the brainchild primarily of Stewart Brand, who said it was largely inspired by the ideas and teachings of Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic and visionary designer slash inventor slash all around outside-the-box thinker. Steve Jobs, in a commencement address at Stanford University said about the WEC: "This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." Stewart Brand went on to be somewhat involved in the evolution of the internet, as a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's also involved in many other ventures of intelligent and unusual approaches to life on "spaceship earth" as Fuller tagged it.

If you had a burning question about something back in the late 60s or early 70s, your search for answers didn't involve a keyboard. But you might have gone to the bookshelf and pulled down a volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, or maybe the WEC. Flipping the pages of the catalogue was tantamount to today's web surfing.

When I first delved into the catalogue I read the built-in novel called "Divine Right's Trip," by Gurney Norman that was printed in the margin of each page. It was a story of a hippie in a '63 Volkswagon bus (named "Urge") and his mobile adventures. I read it during my trip across the country in my '66 Volkswagon bus. That was not planned. One of these days I'll re-read that story. Right now I've got to brush up on the many culinary benefits of the cattail, as described by the late Euell Gibbons. Of course I may need to also educate myself on how to make a flint cutting tool, so I can efficiently harvest the cattails. Then maybe I'll see if I can still get my hands on How To Keep Your Volkswagon Alive, a book once offered by the Catalogue for $5.50.

[mine looked like this, only more funky]