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I never grew up knowing the Whole Earth Catalog, but in the early '80s I was a precocious elementary school student who practically lived in any library I could get access to. My school library happened to have a copy of a particularly magical book that was loosely patterned after the WEC, the "Kids' Whole Future Catalog". https://paleofuture.com/blog/2007/4/27/the-kids-whole-future...

I obsessively checked it out of the library, pouring over page after page of exciting future and near future advancements, and in my little mind seeing a clear path from the Space Shuttle to the city of the future printed on the cover. It was one of those breathless books that showed humanity figuring out how to engineer every natural process, picture upon picture of far off space stations intermingled with then current hydroponics gardens and concepts well beyond that.

I found myself competing with at least one other child and the book never hit the shelf but for a few minutes as it was almost on permanent loan in somebody's backpack. My mother looked for a few weeks trying to find where to buy it for me, but never found a bookstore with it. It was like an object sent from another dimension, mean to teach children and guide them to an inevitable future Utopia.

It worked. I've worked in technology and R&D my entire career. I've yearned to bring about that future.

A few years ago, thinking back to this formative codex, I went about trying to find it and happened to buy a copy on Ebay which set about a small project to get the equipment together to scan it and put it up on the internet archive as no digital version of the book exists to my knowledge. I'm almost there, but haven't quite gotten everything lined up.

Many years later, I learned about the WEC and it immediately hit me that this was the adult version of the feeder league I had been participating in as a child.

I can't believe the WEC is out there now. I need to get my crap together and get the Kid's Catalog up as well.

I have a similar story about a set of books from the 80s that weren't as much as inspiration for me and the future, but instead became a major source of forming my own broad general knowledge on core topics: Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia.

Every week, at the local grocery store, a new volume would be available for purchase, covering a new subject area (Anatomy, Animals, Aircraft, Watercraft, Electricity, Space, Weather, etc.). I was obsessed. I re-read all 15 of them countless times.

30+ years later, I bought a set off ebay in great shape to read with my kids. Seeing the diagrams and pictures I realized it was the source of many of the facts I know today.

You never know what's going to have an impact on your kids helping them realize what they are (going to be) interested in!

I'd love to see it. I had a set of similar books I would pore through as a child like 'Future Cities'[1]. I think it might have been part of a series as well. There was also this big thick book from Readers Digest that had all kinds of things you could build Model boats and Planes (among other things). It's not the 'Crafts and Hobbies' one that's on the internet archive, but it was similar.

[1]: https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/03/04/usborne-publishing-th...

If you can use help with the scan, let me know. I'm in the Bay Area.
Similar story : Growing up , my mother bought us an encyclopedia set (in Spanish) hardcover set with blue covers , where each volume was named after a question, and there were at least 8 with names like:

What? When? How? Why? Who? Where? etc

The questions would range from the "how do planes fly" , to "who discovered gunpowder?". They would have illustration, which was super helpful to picture steam power, and the Cretacean period duration relative to other periods, etc. It was all in color so I suspect they have aged well. I remember coming back to certain questions over and over. Some that I still remember - "When did the universe begin?" "What happened to the dinosaurs?".

IN short I cannot recommend this set enough. I tried to google, I'll need to come back and post it once I find the original that is hanging out at a relative's library.

I kept taking the Whole Mirth Catalog out of the library as a kid.

It’s on the Internet Archive! :D

beautiful reminiscence - my question is: where do people influenced by this stuff collect? I suppose its everywhere - you get those once in a blue moon encounters (hello to chap I met in Bulgaria who was travelling around the MIddle East learning the Oud and would regail tales of late 80s / early 90s san francisco). I'm in Europe - a bit dissatisfied - but buzzing.
Please do. Haven’t thought about this book in decades. Wow.
Related article: The Whole of the Whole Earth Catalog Is Now Online - https://www.wired.com/story/whole-earth-catalog-now-online-i...

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I wonder if there's a torrent download of the entire archive.. Looks like this is pretty close:

The Internet Archive's Whole Earth collection (98.5 GB) - https://archive.org/details/wholeearth

Thanks - I've changed the URL to that article, since it gives more background.

The submitted URL was https://wholeearth.info/, and is obviously worth looking at.

There are 82 items in the collection, you could do a little scraping and run all the downloads through uGet or similar download manager.

Plus, each item has an auto-generated torrent. They aren't very fast generally, but you could theoretically seed the directly downloaded files if you were interested in helping distribute this.

During 1968 through 1972 I lived a block and a half from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Truck store, across the street from Kepler's Bookstore, and around the corner from the Mid Peninsula Free University. There hasn't been a time like that since, and I didn't know what I had until it was gone.
"It wasn't better back then, you were just younger".

The nature of the delights may have shifted, but the delights are still here. I was a teenager in the UK with my transatlantic subscription to CoEvolution Quarterly, weekly trips to Compendium Books in Camden and yeah, it seems like a better time. But I was just younger. Now I have Bandcamp and teh interwebz.

They paved paradise and put in a parking lot.

WEC: Eye-opener. Lot of fun to order exotic stuff (tools, foods, materials, clothing) from. A few for-examples: it got me to cane a seat on a (once-expensive) thrift-shop store ... and try some east-coast kinnikinic ... order tea from Canada (Merchies, still there) ... and a lot of previously unseen books (including Lloyd Kahn's). The cool comments (and stories) around the page-edges were a plus too.

Why didn't you know? Too young?
More relevant today than when this was published in 1986 https://archive.org/download/wholeearthreview00unse_8/page/n...
It's unfortunate how cyclical our world seems to be. Repeating the same conversations endlessly, ad nauseam.
thumbing through encyclopedias published in 1938 is pretty enlightening
Whole Earth Catalog and Fox Fire books were like maker bibles for me when I was a kid. Nothing quite compares to them now days. Fox Fire books in particular were non-commercial (from my memory) and full of really interesting skills and information. They were the maker movement before it was a (tech/online) thing.
What a wonderful memory. I still have all my Foxfire volumes. When a certain web browser came out I thought "They got the name backwards."
I read every single word of this catalog starting the day it was released in 1968, just after I turned 20.

In one of the many biographies of Steve Jobs I've read since, he remarked that he read every word of it when it came out. He was 13 years old at the time.

If you're looking for a quick link, it's at https://wholeearth.info/
About time! For years I would try to visit the Whole Earth website and be met with a barrage of PHP errors. How could a magazine which was so formative for the likes of Steve Jobs be so broke that they couldn't put their archive online properly? Still don't get what happened but happy to see someone's sorted this out.
"Living Poor With Style

Whatever else the Energy Crisis may mean, one thing is certain, prices of everything will continue to rise. When the economy is berserk the sane citizen will participate minimally. For city dwellers this is the best book on acquiring that skill. Living Poor and Living with Style are far from a contradiction in terms both consist of a loving (slightly detached) attention to detail. Here are 600 pages of intelligent detail for $1.95."

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...

— The words of Dear Leader Kim Jong Un to his people
Does anybody also remember the Loompanics [1] book catalog? After the Last Whole Earth Catalog went away, I found even browsing through the titles in Loompanics a mind-altering experience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics

Yes! I loved the Loompanics catalogs and occasionally ordered books from them: mind-blowingly subversive.
Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.

I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.

This book was my World Wide Web as a kid
While this is amazing, I wonder if there is any modern print book series or magazine series that comes close. I'd love to share this with my kids, but digital format is not ideal. Any suggestions (in EN but also any other major European languages in my case).
I'd like the same. I know the spanish version, but not the english one
Nice job Barry!!!! I love it when I fall out of touch with friends for about a decade, then hear of them in headlines. Man, that was a fun party (2008).
Link to the actual catalog: https://wholeearth.info/

In a lot of ways, it seems our simulation truly began in 1970.

These magazines were beautiful. It's a shame that little on the web can compete with them on that front. The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension was a fair crack, when it first came out, but that analogue look, with real human artwork is loads better.
A paywall on an article about something being available for free.

How cute, heh.

The current state of online publishing paints a grim picture for the future of the internet :o(

Especially considering that most of HN is probably just excited about using this information to train AI as look at it themselves.
Growing up with World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica for Windows 98 this just looks more metal and punk versions of it.
Link to jump over the paywall: https://archive.md/j7MbB
something about being hungry and something something about being foolish
stay hungry. stay foolish.

steve jobs commencement speech at stanford univ 2005.

I didn't realize it was so commercial. It's just advertisements for hippie? So you can engage in consumerism and still feel good about yourself?

The Whole Earth Magazine seems much more interesting than the Catalog

> 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.

What a great punch line. Worth reading the whole article.

It is just ironic that the Wired article is behind paywalls while the WEC is available for anyone for free.