Projo Subterranean Homepage News

The Whole Earth Catalog has been on my mind lately. Access to Tools opened my life -- growing, cooking, camping, traveling, wood stoves were driven by instructions, design, and fundamental ideas of how to live creatively and authentically.

Now, Kevin Kelly announces (Lifehacking, the Whole Earth Catalog Archive ) that all the Whole Earth Catalogs -- every edition, supplement, and review, and every subsequent CoEvolution Quarterly -- is now digitized on the Web. You can browse them free at http://www.wholeearth.com:

Kevin, a URI dropout who edited some of the Whole Earth Catalogs and founded Wired magazine, writes,

I've noted previously that much of their charm comes because they were blogs created in newsprint, written before the internet.

...The good news is that all this goodness is now online. Danica Remy and the last holdouts of the old Point Foundation, publishers of the Catalogs and magazine until its last issue in 2002, have given a second life to this gold mine of material by arranging them to be scanned and posted online. The entire 35-year archive of Whole Earth Catalogs, Supplements, Reviews and CoEvolutions are all up and ready to be studied. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. Go here.

I am not thrilled by the interface or format. The pages are clunky to navigate and worse, the proprietary format goes against the essential open system that Whole Earth both preached and practiced. The scans are analog. I could not find anyway to copy and paste text from them. The pages would have been far more useful and easier to use and share as plain old PDF docs.

But, oh! The richness! There are some very are early Whole Earth Catalog Supplements that in all my time at Whole Earth I never saw or read. They are here online now. For those unfamiliar with the wisdom of the Catalog, this archive will serve as a wonderful start. There are more than 100 issues of CoEvolution Quarterly (later called Whole Earth Review) and dozens of Whole Earth Catalogs to keep you up for years.

We --and the tools -- have moved on, but this rebirth of the original inspiration on the Web is a good sign.

I've been thinking lately we need to make an updated version, docs for the 21st century situations in which we find ourselves. The need for Access to Tools is timeless.

 Tags  access to tools frugal Whole Earth Catalog

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