Whole Earth Catalog - Publication After 1972

Publication After 1972

After 1972 the catalog was published sporadically. Updated editions of The Last Whole Earth Catalog appeared periodically from 1971 to 1975, but only a few fully new catalogs appeared. In 1974 the Whole Earth Epilog was published, which was intended as a "volume 2" to the Last Whole Earth Catalog. In 1980, The Next Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-394-70776-1) was published; it was so well received that an updated second edition was published in 1981.

There were two editions in the 1980s of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, a compendium for which Doubleday had bid $1.4 million for the trade paperback rights.

In 1986, The Essential Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-385-23641-7) was published, and in 1988 the WEC was published on CD-ROM using an early version of hypertext. In 1988, there was a WEC dedicated to Communications Tools. A Whole Earth Ecolog was published in 1990, devoted exclusively to environmental topics. Around this time there were special WECs on other topics (e.g., The Fringes of Reason in 1989).

The last "full" WEC, entitled The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-06-251059-2), was published in 1994.

A slender, but still "A3"-sized, 30th Anniversary Celebration WEC was published in 1998 as part of Issue 95 of the Whole Earth magazine (ISSN 0749-5056); it reprinted the original WEC along with new material. An important aspect of this copy of the first WEC was a limitation placed on it by book publishers: because "Publishers begged not to reprint... their names anywhere near books they no longer carry", all such information was placed at the back of the catalog. This placement hampered a valuable function of the WEC: nudging publishers to keep featured seminal works in print.