Christmas, 1971. For Mom. An Original Whole Earther.
That's the inscription in a copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog we brought home from Manassas VA. We don't know who wrote it, and we don't know who Mom was. What we do know is that someone in the family gave her a five-dollar book the size of a newspaper that Christmas, and decided she had earned the word "original."
The Whole Earth Catalog started in Menlo Park, California, in the fall of 1968. Stewart Brand put it together. It didn't sell anything itself. It reviewed books, tools and supplies, and printed where to get each one and what it cost, so you could send away for it yourself. The motto was "access to tools."
For three years it came out in editions and supplements from the Portola Institute, a small nonprofit. Then in June 1971 Brand closed it down with one final edition: 452 pages, fourteen inches tall, distributed by Random House, and titled The Last Whole Earth Catalog. The next spring it won the National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs. No catalog had won one before.
So by Christmas 1971 plenty of people had one, which is what makes the inscription interesting. "Original" was a distinction. Our guess is that Mom had been reading since the early issues, before the New York publisher and the prize, and whoever bought her the last one wanted that on the record.
The book is organized into sections: Whole Systems, Land Use, Shelter, Industry, Craft, Community, Nomadics, Communications, Learning. Near the very end, on pages 435 to 441, it explains how to do a Whole Earth Catalog, in case anyone wanted to start another. Brand ended up taking his own advice. The Whole Earth Epilog came out in October 1974, and there were more after that. The Last was the last for about three years.
It was printed on newsprint, which is made to be read and thrown away. This copy lasted fifty-five years anyway, through however many moves and spring cleanings it took to get from that Christmas to Manassas.
It isn't for sale. Almost everything we bring home along the Pike ends up in the shop sooner or later. This one came home and stayed. It'll turn up again in a story we're working.
