Life Styles: Missal for Mammals

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

That peremptory statement is the introduction to one of the year’s most intriguing books, a $4 quarto-sized paperback that, mainly by word of mouth, has become an underground bestseller.

Gods do not make bricks, of course —or build sun domes, or scramble for sassafras in the shrubbery of Central Park. But for people who do, or want to, the Whole Earth Catalog is an almost inexhaustible compendium. Although it is specifically aimed at “technological dropouts” (in the words of its authors), the catalogue’s phenomenal success shows that it has a far vaster range of appeal. It is a sort of Sears, Roe-buck-Consumer Report for the minorities of the cybernetic age—from activists who want to improve the environment or create a Utopian society to abdicants who simply want to write bad poetry in the woods.

In 128 pages, the catalogue lists more than 300 items, each of which may be ordered directly from the manufacturer or from the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, Calif. They include books (mostly old), magazines (mostly new), potters’ kick wheels, tape recorders, solar stills, Kaibab boots, programmed reading cards, natural foods, Aladdin lamps and a list of experimental schools compiled by John Holt, author of How Children Fail.

Do-It-Yourself Utopia, Want a computer? The catalogue offers a choice: a spiffy, $4,900 Hewlett-Packard tabletop model with a 19-register magnetic core memory—or a $1.95 book of instructions on how to build one yourself. Want to start a commune? The Whole Earth Catalog lists how-to books on primitive house building (adobe huts, log cabins, teepees, metal domes constructed from jettisoned auto bodies), organic farming, sewage disposal, practical sociology. It also reprints a letter from a disillusioned former commune member who writes: “If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian, and if it is authoritarian, it offers no more freedom than conventional society. I am not pleased with this conclusion, but it now seems to me that the only way to be free is to be alone.”

The catalogue essentially mirrors the mind and esoteric interests of its creator, Stewart Brand, 30, a Stanford graduate (biology) and onetime member of Novelist Ken Kesey’s acidulous Merry Pranksters. He has made a name for himself as a talented fantastical photographer and promoter.

Orders of Magnitude. In the summer of 1968, on a philanthropic whim, Brand loaded 40 books and assorted merchandise into a battered 1963 Dodge camper and toured New Mexico’s hippie communes dispensing tools and practical advice to the new settlers. That original Truck Store turned a modest profit of $300, and Brand decided to expand into a mail-order operation that would provide wider, more efficient dissemination of theory, fact and artifact. Working for months with a small staff of testers and contributors, he turned out a catalogue with a first print order of 2,000. The book quickly proved so popular that he issued a second edition of 30,000 last spring, will produce a third, extensively revised version this month with a press run of 60,000.

“We’re in an age of dinosaurs,” says Brand. “It’s best to be a mammal. Most of what we are doing here is to aid and abet the development of mammals.” To that end, the catalogue lists and reviews instructional manuals in such arts as giving a massage (“People rubbing people is always nice. People rubbing people with skill is an order of magnitude nicer”), making beer and wine, building a classical guitar, Film Making in Schools (“Hot ziggety zag”) and playing music on a computer.

Books are the single largest classification in the catalogue; they include works by a predictable pantheon of authors—Buckminster Fuller, Carl Jung, John Cage, Arthur Koestler—and some not so predictable. Particularly recommended are Cosmic View, a 1957 children’s book by Dutch Schoolmaster Kees Boeke (“You advance in and out through the universe,” says the blurb, “changing scale by a factor of ten”) and Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbons’ foraging guide to edible wild plants. There are “pop enlightenment” texts on yoga, sense relaxation, self-hypnosis and psycho-cybernetics. Among the catalogue’s biggest sellers is The Survival Book by Nesbitt, Pond and Allen -“an excellent handbook for Air Force pilots downed in remote regions.”

Foam-Rubber Swords. Nonliterary objects offered for sale in the Whole Earth Catalog range from the practical to the whimsical, from power tools and tractors to “Boffers”—$11 foam-rubber swords that the catalogue calls “the first significant advance in weaponry since the encounter group.” The Ashley Thermostatic Wood Burning Circulator is an $80 Franklin stove, equipped with a thermostat, that will go up to twelve hours without refueling. The Inquiry Box is a $19.96 gadget designed to teach theory building and theory testing: “By pulling and pushing the things that stick out and by poking around inside with a stick, you’re supposed to figure out what arrangement of pulleys, pegs, springs and strings is inside.” The Moog Synthesizer is an electronic music maker that sells for anywhere from $3,500 to $8,000, depending on the model: “The synthesizers are built slowly, and before each one goes out, it is left on for a week and then dropped on the floor. This procedure helps to locate any construction flaws.”

Although the Whole Earth Catalog is selling briskly across the U.S. and abroad, it may soon become a collector’s item. Brand plans to cease publication in 1971. “If by that time there aren’t people and ideas around doing a better job than we have, then we’ll have failed,” he says. Brand expects to keep the Truck Store operating as a mail-order service, but his personal plans are indefinite—to say the least. “I may just spend a while having fantasies,” he says. “But 1971 is a long time from now —like a generation.”