There had never been anything quite like the catalog.
Subtitled "Access to Tools," the first 64-page volume sold for $5 and included photos, drawings and short written endorsements of books, tools, gadgets and materials organized into seven sections ranging from "Understanding Whole Systems" and "Shelter and Land Use" to "Nomadics" and "Learning."
Decades later, in 2005, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs tried to explain the catalog to a new generation in a Stanford University commencement address, he described it as Google before Google.
However, that doesn't quite capture the spirit or the intent of Brand's riotous assembly of notions and revelations, large and small. Using a search engine is akin to taking a rapid trip down a long hall to find what you are hunting behind a door. In contrast, the "Whole Earth Catalog" was like a seemingly endless hall of adjacent doors — all open, easy to peek into.
The "Whole Earth Catalog" was serendipity between covers.
That was underscored when, in June 1971, Brand commissioned novelist Gurney Norman to write "Divine Right's Trip" and then threaded it in easily consumable chunks through the "Last Whole Earth Catalog" — in the process drawing readers to parts of that sprawling 452-page edition they wouldn't have otherwise visited.
Leafing through the "Whole Earth Catalog" would take you from a description of a textbook on engineering design to the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers to a summary of a New Scientist article raising the question, "Should sportsmen take dope?" and then to a half-page illustrated description of a book on "Creative Glass Blowing."
The catalog resonated with a generation who had grown up in an upwardly mobile but stale society. Millions of them would explore "sustainable" living in the form of the brief back-to-the-land movement. Others dabbled in the human potential movement and psychedelic drugs. The catalog became both groups' bible of transformation.
