The Whole of the 'Whole Earth Catalog' Is Now Online

A nearly complete digital library of Whole Earth publications—including the famed Whole Earth Catalog founded 55 years ago by counterculture icon Stewart Brand—has been made available online for the first time. A curious reader can now flip through all the old catalogs, magazines, and journals right in their web browser, or download entire issues to their computer free of charge.

The Whole Earth Catalog was the proto-blog—a collection of reviews, how-to guides, and primers on anarchic libertarianism printed onto densely packed pages. It carried the tagline “Access to Tools” and offered know-how, product reviews, cultural analysis, and gobs of snark, long before you could get all that on the internet.

At the time of its initial publication in the late 1960s, the periodical became a beacon for techno-optimists and back-to-the-land hippies. The Whole Earth Catalog preached self-reliance, teaching young baby boomers how to build their own cabins, garden sheds, and geodesic domes after they had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out—well before they grew wealthy enough to buy up all the three-bedroom single-family homes. The catalog also had a profound impact on Silicon Valley’s ethos, and is credited with seeding the ideas that helped fuel today’s startup culture. Steve Jobs famously referenced the Whole Earth Catalog in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, likening it to Google before Google existed. Some Whole Earth writers went on to build online communities like The Well and launch publications of their own—some even ended up at WIRED.

Barry Threw, the executive director of the San Francisco art collective Gray Area, helmed the restoration project, in association with the cultural organization the Long Now Foundation and the Internet Archive, which is hosting the digital collection. Threw says taking on the task of digitizing thousands of pages of the Whole Earth back catalog was motivated by a frustrating experience trying to find an article from one of the old issues.

“It started dawning on me that there was just a load of content that was seminal stuff that was just not publicly available,” Threw says. “It literally hadn't been scanned anywhere, and the stuff was impossible to get. It seemed like a good idea to do it while Stewart was still alive.”