Adorned with the byline “Access To Tools,” Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog became a scared text of 1970’s American counterculture. The publication gathered an eclectic pool of resources, recommending the writings of Buckminster Fuller on one page and a new CB radio on the next. Though the catalog’s range was immense, its tenets were of humanist skew; the pages urged readers to get hip to ecology, to arm themselves with knowledge and self-sufficiency, to embrace communal ways of life. As summarized by the MoMA, the catalog aimed to “create a community meeting-place in print,” synthesizing a curation of ideas that its editors believed had the potential to unify people and grow communities.

While each issue of the catalog gained a bit more in the way of production value, the inaugural publication was a concise index, composed largely of books. Ranging from Frank Herbert’s Dune to Jungian psychology texts by Jung himself, the selections were not necessarily related to the untrained (or unguided) eye. The Whole Earth Catalog created a network from independent ideas, opening avenues of dialogue that bridged the included perspectives. This website, Whole Pratt Catalog, imposes this network upon the library of Pratt Institute, a private university of the arts in Brooklyn, New York. By identifying all the Whole Earth-approved texts within Pratt’s stacks, The Whole Earth Catalog lives on through the sum of its parts.