From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller
From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller | New York, New York
ISBN: 978-0000000000
ISBN-10: 0000000000
Updated: 2024-12-18
Copyright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Copyright Holder.
ENCODED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
If we had some way of putting tracers on the pictures, you would see chemical elements gradually getting closer and closer together, and, finally, getting into those various vegetable places and into roasts and, tighter and tighter, into cans, into the store, finally getting to just being you or metemporarily, becoming my hair, my ear, some part of my skinand then that breaks up and goes off and gets bloVvn around as dust.
Each of us is a very complex pattern integrity with which we were born.
¶ A NOTE
Over two hundred volumes from Fuller’s working library are detailed on the following pages. Most were sent to him inscribed by friends and colleagues, or were acquired by him, read, annotated, and inscribed at later meetings. Some include his notes, many boast his signature, and nearly every book bears his typed label designating its context, taped to the spine: “architecture,” “literature,” “philosophy,” and “city planning” are just a few of his categories, though many of these works are interdisciplinary, as was his life. The intimate presentations in this collection include words of praise and gratitude from architects and architecture students, city planners, anthropologists, futurists, environmentalists, artists, designers, and others worldwidebordering, at times, on hagiographyand evince Fuller’s own cross-disciplinary impact.
In recognition of his wide-ranging interests, his influence in many fields, and his international stature, we have organized this catalogue for the most part by genre: Anthropology, Architecture, Art, City Planning, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Future Planning, History, Literature, Political Science, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Reference, Religion, Space Science.
We have made an exception in the case of those authors of particular importance to Fuller, such as Anni and Josef Albers, Bil Baird, John Cage, Constantines Doxiadis, and others. We have also excepted those authors represented by multiple titles falling into different categories, or by works that can be claimed by more than one discipline. All of these are integrated alphabetically by author or subject. Some interdisciplinary works fall naturally into subject country or country of originAustralia, India, Israel, Japan, South Africa, for example; in the absence of close personal association or narrowly defined content, these have been catalogued by nationality.
¶ From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller
The Earliest Book In The Library
¶ A.E. The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. New York: Macmillan, 1916.
(AE 1982) 8vo.; light stains to endpapers; light foxing to preliminaries; cloth; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper, dated June 19, 1962, with this note: Purchased at Gotham Book Mart* W.46th St. N.Y.C. as I talked with Francis Stelloff of her first garden party at the Mart for Joyce’s (1938?) Finnegan’s [sic] Wake publishing. Francis had just returned in June ’62 from Dublin’s celebration of Joyce and dedication of his home to the city. And we recalled that in 1934 “A.E.” Russell came to America and C.K. Ogden introduced him to me (B.F.) and Russell recounted to B.F. that his friend Joyce greatly admired B.F.’s writing style as exemplified in Shelter Mag 1932. R.B.E (Shelter, Fuller’s journal of ideas, had a two year life span.) At the top of the page he added * Gotham Book Mart. Opposite Chris Morley’s hideaway office in garret on 46th. Chris Morley, Bill Benet and B. Fuller frequently met for “3 hours for lunch club’ ’ picnics at Gotham Book Mart in years 1934–1942.
Fuller published his first book, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), in response to conversations with Christopher Morley on Einstein’s influence in everyday life. Morley walked it through the ranks at Lippincott, who published his own books, and helped to launch it at Francis Stelloff’s small but densely packed Gotham Book Mart. In 1940, after Kitty Foyle brought him some measure of financial success, Morley underwrote the development of Fuller’s earliest Dymaxion deployment unitsthe “grain bin housing” inspired by their road trip through Missouri grain fields. “But he put up something no money can buy,” Fuller reflected in his memoir, “a backing of creative enthusiasm, a confidence and joy in individual initiative, amusement over the paradoxes of adversity, and complete submission to what Chris spoke of at Don Marquis’s funeral as ‘the Holiest Ghost we shall ever know: creative imagination’ ” (Fuller, 1980, p. 78).
Morley’s affection and esteem for Fuller is poignantly revealed in his dedication of Streamlines (1936): “For Buckminster Fuller, scientific idealist, whose innovations proceed not just from technical dexterity, but from an organic vision of life” (ibid., 76). Years after Morley’s death, Fuller remarked, “I couldn’t have had a closer friend.” For a copy of Morley’s posthumous Prefaces Without Books, see entry #156.
Morley treated Gotham Book Mart as a second homehis residence was across the streetand regularly hosted picnics in their garden for his “three hours for lunch club,” which included William Rose Benet, and the painter Bill Hall, among others. Fuller was invited to join the club virtually upon his introduction to Morley, and he gladly accepted. “I made this transition because the event of Greenwich Village [and his time at Romany Marie’s] was over, and suddenly there was the Three Hours for Lunch Club and a group of extraordinarily interesting writers and poets, people like Don Marquis and F.RA., and many others, with whom I drank copiously” (Hatch, p. 138). For several hours at a stretch Morley would work on his fiction, or his Saturday Evening Post column (which now and then included tributes to his hostess), but after hours revelry would reign. As W.G. Rogers puts it in his history of the shop, “There was always enough to drink but, it seems, never enough glasses…” (Wise Men Fish Here, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1965, p. 159). In addition to reading, writing, and carousing, Morley curated art exhibits in the shop’s courtyard, with Hall’s help.
…no esthetic movement was launched here, theory did not pre-empt the conversation. But another French word, bonhomie, fits the spirit created by Morley. It was good-fellows-get-together, laughter in the cloister, wit and fun spiced with learning. Some of the decade’s best minds relaxed in congenial company; they dashed off doggerel, quipped in ancient and modern languages, and recited limericks that were for reciting only, not for printing, (ibid., 160)
Morley helped develop the store into a literary haunt that would be in New York in the 1930s what Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company had been in Paris in the ‘teens and ‘20s: a haven for some of the most notable American and European writers and editors, including John Dos Passes, Thornton Wilder, E.E. Cummings, Eugene Jolas, James Laughlin, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Anais Nin, Dorothy Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice B. Toklas, Parker Tyler, Louise Bogan, Pascal Covici, Malcolm Cowley, Caresse Crosby, William Carlos Williams, and many others.
¶ Adler, Alfred. UNDERSTANDING Human Nature. Translated by Walter Beran Wolfe. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., (1927).
8vo.; cloth; extremities chipped; library label on spine.
First English language edition of Adler’s most lasting contribution to psychology, derived from his lectures at the Viennese Institute for Adult Education. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper: Buckminster Fuller / Woodmere L.I. 1 April ‘31. With his pencil sketches of various interlocking geometric shapes on the front pastedown.
The Austrian-born psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) began his career in 1895, when he achieved his M.D. at the University of Vienna. His first book, published in 1898, established Adler in diametric opposition to Freud. Though Adler was, for a short time, a member of Freud’s weekly discussion circle, their views grew increasingly divergent and Adler founded a school with several like-minded colleagues. The Neurotic Constitution was published in 1912 [in German, as Uber den Nervoesen Charakter] and Understanding Human Nature, in 1927 [in German, as Menschenkenntnis}. In the late ‘teens and early ’20s Adler set up several child guidance clinics in Vienna, inspiring mental health professionals to do the same worldwide. In the mid-’20s he began lecturing in the United States during the academic year and summering in Vienna, a schedule he maintained with few lapses until his death.
¶ (Agassiz, Louis) Davenport, Guy. The INTELLIGENCE OF LOUIS AGASSIZ. A specimen book of scientific writings. Selected, with an introduction and notes. Foreword by Alfred S. Romer. Boston: Beacon Press, (1963).
8vo.; half-cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition of Davenport’s study of Agassiz (1807-1873), the Swiss-born founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. A major force in the development of natural historyespecially the study of living and fossil fish and glaciersin the United States, he popularized an interest in and knowledge of his primary areas of study. Davenport, a writer, critic, and artist whose work is founded upon intellectual investigation of works of the past and their place in the present, has published two collections of essays: The Geography of the Imagination (1981) and Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). Erik Anderson Reece offers a glowing catalogue of his other achievements, noting his award-winning fiction; his art criticism, especially his work on Balthus; book, dust-jacket, and journal illustrations; poetry; literary criticism, especially his work on Pound and Modernism; and his translations of Heraclitus, Diogenes, Anacreon and Sappho. “For his work in all of these metiers,” Reece writes, “he was given the MacArthur ‘genius’ award in 1990” (Reece, A Balance of Quinces, NY: New Directions, 1996, 26).
A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: For R. Buckminster Fuller with admiration, 13 October 65 Lexington, Kentucky Guy Davenport. Signed at the foot of the page, R. Buckminster Fuller.
¶ (Albers, Anni. On DESIGNING. (New Haven, CT: The Pellango Press, 1959.)
8vo.; black and white illustrations; black and white paper-covered boards; dust-jacket printed in imitation of the cover; lightly rubbed; two minor closed tears..
Boxed together in a specially made cloth slipcase with:
Albers, Anni. On Designing. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
8vo.; black and white illustrations; black and white paper-covered boards.
First and second editions of Albers’s first book, a collection of ten essays with the full text restored to those that had been abridged for periodical publication. The second edition, with two additional essays (“Designing” and “Conversations with Artists”) is a presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky and Anne with love, Anni A. Albers developed a close friendship with Fuller while at Black Mountain College where she was an assistant professor of art from 1933 to 1949.
Fuller provided one of the dust-jacket blurbs for the first edition of On Designing:
From aeronautical altitudes, the criss-cross grids of Earth’s cities seem to be two-dimensional planar arrangements, as do woven fabric surfaces, seen from a distance. Seen from inside the city streets or within the loom, both cities and fabrics disclose multi-dimensional structuring of great complexity.
Anni Albers, more than any other weaver, has succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structuring of fabrics. She has brought the artist’s intuitive sculpturing faculties and the age- long weaver’s arts into historically successful marriage.
Among the most respected female artists of the twentieth century, Anni Albers (1899–1994) began her distinguished career as both a student and teacher at the Bauhaus, where she met and married the famed artist, designer, and writer Josef Albers. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis to admit party members to the faculty, both Anniwho was Jewishand her husband hoped to emigrate to the United States.
Philip Johnson of New York’s Museum of Modern Art introduced their work to the painter John Andrew Rice, then evolving his plan for the Utopian academic experiment that would become the Black Mountain College: a community comprised of teachers and students who lived their pedagogical experience 24 hours day all over their “campus,” rather than in constricted pockets of time and space. Despite Josef’s lack of English, Rice hired the couple on the basis of Johnson’s enthusiasm. He was not disappointed. Josef Albers, whose years at Black Mountain and relationship to Fuller is detailed in entry #6, became a driving force during his sixteen-year tenure, which ended in 1949.
Martin Duberman, in Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, gives a sense of the environment that prevailed at Black Mountain: “[F]rom 1933 to 1956, this tiny enclave in the mountains of North Carolina became a sort of testing ground for ideas and attitudes that would help to shape the cultural climate of the nineteen sixties. Its faculty sometimes taught without pay rather than give up the experiment, and its students exemplified, twenty years before the Beat or the Hippie generations, the search for a ‘meaningful’ counterculture. The college also attracted an amazing number of seminal American artists at critical moments in their developmentBuckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, Paul Goodman, and Josef Albers all taught there at one time or another…” (p. 27).
Though trained in several disciplines, Anni Albers focused her early attentions on textiles and industrial design, and became the first weaver to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. She received the Gold Medal for Craftsmanship from the American Institute of Architects, and the Decorative Arts Book Citation for her second book, On Weaving (1965). In 1964 she attended the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles on a fellowship; by 1970, after years of increasing experimentation with printmaking, she was devoting all of her energies to that pursuit.
¶ (Albers, Anni) Anni Albers. By Gene Baro. With an essay by Nicholas Fox Weber. (Published for the exhibition “Anni Albers: Drawings and Prints,” The Brooklyn Museum, October 1-November 11,1977.)
8vo.; 78 black and white and color illustrations; white illustrated wrappers; lightly rubbed. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this exhibition cataloguethe first publication dealing exclusively with Albers’s work in a graphic medium; with an introductory note by Michael Botwinick, the Director of the Brooklyn Museum; Gene Baro’s interview with Albers; Weber’s history of Albers’s work; and images of “virtually all Anni Albers’s major drawings, important preparatory studies, and her full output of prints.” A presentation copy, with a typed note signed, Anni, to Fuller, January 25,1978, on one leaf of Albers’s letterhead: “Dear Bucky, This comes to you with endless love and thanks. Yours, Anni.” With a carbon of Fuller’s typed thank-you note.
¶ Albers, Josef. INTERACTION OF COLOR. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963.
4to.; 80 folios of full-color plates; one wrappered volume of commentary; one cloth portfolio; publishers cloth slipcase.
First edition of Albers’s most important book, his “record of an experimental way of studying color and of teaching color” (introduction). The 80 plates, divided into 22 sections, are laid into the cloth portfolio; the wrappered volume prints Albers’s commentary on the images. In that essay, elaborating on his practical discoveries and underlyingor; he would claim, resultant philosophies, Albers addresses 25 issues, such as “Color recollection visual memory”; “A color has many facesthe relativity of color”; “The Bezold Effect”; “Color juxtapositionharmonyquantity”; and “The Weber-Fechner Lawthe measure in mixture.”
In his dedication Albers acknowledges the value of his teaching experiences on the evolution of Interaction of Color: “This book is thanks to my students.” And at the end of the text, where he lists his collaborators, in lieu of a bibliography, he writes, “In addition to the dedication of this book, I should like to state that my students in color have taught me more about color than have books about color.” Among the over 60 authors of studies reproduced here, the following are the most prolifically represented: Patricia Coughlin, Paul Covington, May Kedney, James McNair, Elizabeth Moffitt, Sewell Sillman, Austin Towle, Miles Weintraub, and Albers himself.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title of the cloth-bound volume: For Buckminster Fuller in admiration Febr 1968 J.A. Albers was single-handedly responsible for bringing Fuller on board at Black Mountain in the summer of 1948, to teach Architecture and Industrial Engineering.
Fuller recalled that his war-time talks sponsored by the Boeing Company and others led to an invitation from the Chicago Institute of Design. “They were crazy about my presentation and apparently as a consequence I got a call from Joseph [szc] Albers at Black Mountain College, to be one of their summer professors for the summer of 1948, and I accepted” (Fuller, 1980, p.85). Despite the fact that by 1948 Fuller had designed life-saving devices for the U.S. Navy in the ‘teens, the Dymaxion House (1927), the Dymaxion Car (1933), the Dymaxion Bathroom (1936), steel and fiberglass Dymaxion military igloos in use during the Second World War, the Dymaxion Air-ocean World Map (1943), and was actively exploring opportunities to build working Geodesic Domes, he had little if any public image. Such as that image was, writes Duberman, it “tended to be of a half-mad Rube Goldberg character.” But Fuller had maintained an active interest in Black Mountain since profiling the college in his short-lived journal Shelter in the early ‘30s, and was eager to participate in the community. He cherished his time there and after tension that had been long brewing among the faculty and student body resulted in Albers’s resignation, Fuller agreed to step in to direct the 1949 summer session.
Albers (1888–1976) studied art at some of the leading institutions in Germany before accepting a teaching position in 1923 at the Bauhaus, where he remained for ten years to develop his own work in stained glass, typography, furniture design, and oil painting. In 1933 he and his wife, Anni, fled Nazi oppression for the United States, becoming American citizens in 1939. From his emigration until he took over Yale’s design department in 1949, Albers was a leading influence at Black Mountain College. He later recalled the difference between his Bauhaus and Black Mountain experiences, and their impact on his teaching methods: At the Bauhaus, he claimed, he “never had used the word ‘education’ once…we spoke about influencing the industry.” At Black Mountain, he felt “much more personally obliged for the creatures under [his] hands.” Duberman explains, the focus was less on shaping civic forms than individual human beings, and the shift of emphasis modified Albers’ own approach accordingly…. The Bauhaus had been far more concerned with rethinking the relationship between art and design, and design and use, than Black Mountain was, but central to both was a concern with the relationship between art and life…. [H]e acknowledges that the basic drawing course he offered at Black Mountain was closely patterned on the preliminary (Basic Design) course he had earlier taught at the Bauhausthough at Black Mountain the exercises were applied to broader educational goals and in some ways (especially regarding theories on color) considerably elaborated, (pp. 61, 62, 64)
Albers’s courseson color and design“were never narrowly technical,” but “involved principles and procedures applicable to a wide variety of activities,” especially “the realization that form has meaning, and that ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ shift value according to context,” Duberman notes. “What Albers embodied above all was a search ‘to make some kind of order out of things’ some perfect ordera search many took to be emblematic of the purpose of the college as a whole” (p. 73).
At Yale, Albers began Homage to the Square, the series for which he is best-known and on which Interaction of Color is based. Albers addresses his goal in his introduction; in part:
In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really isas it physically is…. First, it should be learned that one and the same color evokes innumerable readings.
…This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception of “theory and practice.” It reverses this order and places practice before theory, which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.
Practical exercises demonstrate through color deception (illusion) the relativity and instability of color. And experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.
In his lectures Albers liked to analogize his theories of color with his perception of people: “An individual, like a color or a line, could dominate temporarily but ‘perceptual ambiguities’ soon shift the mix, someone or something else emerging into the foreground; ‘when you really understand that each color is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as about color.’ This was the heart of Albers’s sociology as well as his artthough some thought his colors yielded dominance more readily than his person” (Duberman, 68).
¶ (Anthropology) Leakey, Richard E. and Roger Lewin. ORIGINS. What new discoveries reveal about the emergence of our species and its possible future. New York: E. Dutton, (1977).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; library label on spine.
First edition of Leakey’s presentation of his ground-breaking findings at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, doubling the age of modern man to three million years and supporting his parents’ controversial theory, maintaining that “three or even more species of primitive hominids existed simultaneously in the same geographic region millions of years ago. Why ‘our’ lineHomosurvived while others vanished is the central question of this pioneering and exciting study of human evolution…. [the authors] show that the key to the transformation of an ape-like creature into a human being was the ability to share in a complex social context. This quality of cooperation demonstrated by early man’s long history of peaceful hunting and gatheringnot unbridled human aggression-is the basic feature of humanity” (dust-jacket).
Signed on the front endpaper: R. Buckminster Fuller / Jan 23–1978 I Santa Monica I Calif.
¶ (Anthropology) Levi-Strauss, Claude. The SAVAGE Mind. (Chicago): The University of Chicago Press, (1966).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; spine lightly darkened; light wear top edge.
First English translation of La pensee sauvage, Levi-Strauss’s landmark attack on the traditional division between “primitive” and “modern” thought.
¶ (Anthropology) Levi-Strauss, Claude. STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY. Translated from the French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. London: Allen Lane / The Penguin Press, 1968.
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; edgeworn.
First English edition of Levi-Strauss’s foundational statement. The first English-language edition was published in 1963 by the University of Chicago Press. Signed on the front endpaper: Buckminster Fuller.
¶ (Anthropology) Liger-Belair, Jacques. L’HABITATION AU LlBAN. La formation de la tradition et son evolution. Beyrouth-Liban: L’Association pour la protection des sites et anciennes demeures, 1966.
Oblong 8vo.; several page edges faintly yellowed; black and white photographs; glossy paper-covered boards, cloth spine; rubbed.
First edition of this photographic text promoting the protection of historic sites in Liban.
¶ (Architecture) Aronin, Jeffrey Ellis. CLIMATE AND ARCHITECTURE. Progressive Architecture Book. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, (1953).
4to.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; illustrated dust-jacket; light wear; few nicks; library label on spine.
First edition of this key work, produced “to acquaint architects, architectural students, engineers, city planners, builders, present and prospective home owners, and othersespecially those in North Americawith the demands and phenomena of the large- and small-scale climate, known respectively as the macroclimate and the microclimate; and to inform them how to apply this knowledge to the design and orientation of buildings and towns” (introduction). Climate and Architecture derives from Aronin’s intensive years of study following his 1946 observation as a member of the press of Exercise Muskox: “a ninety-day, 3100-mile Canadian Army expedition to the far north …composed of many of the world’s leading scientists, explorers, engineers, and military men, who endeavored to find the best solution to the problem of living in the severe cold” (dust-jacket).
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To my good friend, Bucky Fuller, two days younger than my father, and who has been and is a great source of inspiration, I dedicate this last uncirculated volume of the first edition, and thank him in advance for the kind foreword he is preparing for the fourth edition of Climate And Architecture. With the high regard and esteem of Jeffrey Ellis Aronin. Woodmere, New York 29 July 1982. Aronin begins his introduction by quoting Frank Lloyd Wright on the importance of recognizing that “intimacy with Nature is the great friendship,” and that “the profound naturalness of his own being is the essential condition of a great architect and the condition of greatness in the man.” His development of these definitions into a view that the architect must embrace myriad disciplines surely struck a chord with Fuller: “Wright is right, but architects must need for their professional work some knowledge of sociology, sculpture, mechanical engineering, painting, woodwork, electrical engineering, public health, geography, plumbing, landscaping, civil engineering, city planning, office administration, law, design, physics, sanitation, accounting, and, besides many other items, climatology and microclimatology.”
¶ (Architecture) Banham, [Peter] Reyner. The New Brutalism: Ethic OR AESTHETIC? Documents of Modern Architecture edited by Jurgen Joedicke. London: The Architectural Press, (1966).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; library label on spine; dust-jacket; wear to edges and extremities.
First edition of Banham’s analysis of the Brutalist movement, including a compelling discussion of Fuller’s influence. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To Buckyfrom [printed Reyner Banham] for reasons which appear on page 69. On page 69, beneath an interior shot of Fuller’s house, Banham writes:
…more fundamentally ‘other’ is the approach of a designer like Buckminster Fuller, especially as the architectural profession started by mistaking him for a man preoccupied with creating structures to envelop spaces…. [T]he structure is simply a means toward, the space merely a by-product of, the creation of an environment, and that given other technical means, Fuller might have satisfied his quest for ever-higher environmental performance in some more ‘other’ way. The truth of this has been dawning on architects for some time, and many have come to adopt an attitude of extreme hostility towards him, usually couched in the form of ridicule and harping on certain obvious questions, such as, how do you make an entrance in a dome?… The Smithsons are to be included among those who have adopted this attitude to Fuller, so are practically all others who could carry the name of Brutalist. In the last resort they are dedicated to the traditions of architecture as the world has come to know them: their aim is not “une architecture autre” but, as ever, “vers une architecture.”
British architectural and design historian Reyner Banham (1922–88) is credited with helping to found the field of architecture criticism. He got his start in the Independent Group, which brought together a handful of artists, architects, and designers whose informal discussions of issues such as mass culture and advertising during the early 1950s at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art eventually grew into the British Pop art movement. Banham’s ideas shaped a new generation of rebellious architects whose disaffection with the prevailing international style would manifest itself in a new, hybrid, post-modern architecture. His colleagues included Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and others, who offered a wide spectrum of perspectives. Banham once harnessed his career for an article in Guardian: “[A] range of professional interests running from industrial design through architecture to city planningbut hence, also, non-professional interests (at a consumer level) in automobile racing and pop-music. As a result of the latter I have a second ‘reputation’ as an authority on pop culture (and Los Angeles), and am regarded as a sort of background influence on British pop painting and sculpture.” Of his many monographs, the best known are: Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1984), and Concrete Atlantis (1986).
¶ (Architecture) Banham, [Peter] Reyner. The ARCHITECTURE OF THE Well-Tempered Environment. London: The Architectural Press, (1969).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; white dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; bumped; one small closed tear; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed by Banham on the title page. At one point in this study Banham seeks to contextualize the aesthetic of Fuller’s Dymaxion house, designed in 1927:
Such willingness to abandon the reassurances and psychological supports of monumental structure are rarea notable exception to the general rule, for instance, is Buckminster Fuller who has always expressed hostility to sheer mass in what he would call “the shelter industry.” Although Fuller is now one of the industry’s senior citizens, his birth in 1895 meant that he entered the world almost exactly half-way between the introduction of domestic electric light and that of industrial air-conditioning. An enthusiastic child of his time, he has always been at home in the worlds that these two epochal innovations have transformed.
The profession of architecture (of which Fuller is only an honorary member, on the basis of “Join him, we can’t beat him”) as a continuing body of human activity, is not a child of that time. Its traditions, as a conscious intellectual discipline, go back to the Italian renaissance; and as a practical craft they go back almost to the dawn of human culture…(pp. 265–66)
¶ (Architecture) Banham, [Peter] Reyner. Los ANGELES: The ARCHITECTURE OF Four Ecologies. (London: Allen Lane /The Penguin Press, 1971.)
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; minor edgewear.
First edition of Banham’s celebration of the unorthodox mixing of architectural styles that characterized Los Angeles. Prefiguring Robert Venturi’s argument of the same order about Las Vegas (Learning from Las Vegas ) by a handful of years, Banham’s work served as a clarion call for a new appreciation of vernacular architecture. In addition, it argued that LA represented a new kind of polyglot city, a harbinger of future cities, which needed to be understood if humans were to flourish in urban settings. The book’s influence was immense, though its popularity was eclipsed by Venturi’s work.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To Bucky from Peter.
¶ (Architecture) Bohm, Victor. CUBES AND Man. A psychological view of architecture. With a foreword by Richard Neutra. New York: Psychological Library Publishing, (1969).
8vo.; black and white and a few color photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; spine sunned; two chips, one removing the “ard” of “Richardz”
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller with my deep esteem and compliments, Victor Bohm. 1.30.70. Bohm writes of Fuller’s U.S. Pavilion, pictured from Expo 67: “Fuller’s geodesic bubble, 250 feet in diameter and 137 feethigh, is a prototype ‘environmental valve,’ a controlled, synthetic world-within- a-world. Domes of this kind may some day contain entire communities, protecting them from weather and polluted air. Inside, the dome gives the impression of endless enclosed space through the elimination of corners and right angles. It represents a pushing out of the conventional boundaries of space-within-space, a result of the same feelings that cause men to raise skyscrapers and circle the moon” (p. 80). Fuller’s dome for the Montreal Expo was the signal structure for that international exhibition; it dominated the Fair’s landscape like an exclamation mark proclaiming the permanence of Fuller’s stature in architectural circles.
¶ (Architecture) (Breuer, Marcel) Papachristou, Tician. Marcel Breuer. New Buildings and Projects. New York: Praeger Publishers, (1970).
(Breuer and Papachristou 1970)
4to.; black and white photographs and illustrations (a few in color); brown cloth, stamped in black; white photographic dust-jacket; light edgewear; slightly yellowed.
First edition of this book designed by Breuer with Gerd Hatje. Focusing on his work from 1960–70, this picks up where Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects, 1921–60 left off. It is comprised of photographs and drawings, prefaced by an introductory biographical note and excerpts from a handful of Breuer’s lectures and essays.
Breuer’s career developed at the Bauhaus, first as a student in the early 1920s, later as a Master. But despite its influence, like Fuller “he felt its philosophy was not sufficiently oriented toward industry to produce a practical architecture.” And, like Fuller, some of his earliest work involves the use of modular prefabricated elements. In 1937 he began his decade of teaching at Harvard, where he worked on apartment design. In 1946 he opened an office in New York, and designed plans for public buildings and residential neighborhoods throughout North and South America and Europe.
¶ (Architecture) Conrads, Ulrich and Hans G. Sperlich. The ARCHITECTURE OF FANTASY: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times. Translated, edited, and expanded by Christiane Crasemann Collins and George R. Collins. New York: Praeger, (1962).
4to.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; light wear; photographic dust-jacket; light wear, especially to edges; small chip; library label on spine.
First English translation, expanded from the 1960 German edition; includes discussions, photographs, and illustrations of Fuller’s geodesic dome and other concepts on pages 19, 118–19, 158 and 181.
¶ (Architecture) Le Corbusier. TOWARDS A New ARCHITECTURE. Translated from the thirteenth French edition with an introduction by Frederick Etchells. New York: Payson &c Clarke Ltd., [1927].
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; edges and front endpaper soiled; cloth; darkened; wear to extremities.
First English translation. With Fuller’s full ownership signature in pencil on the front endpaper: Richard Buckminster Fuller.
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965) adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier from a twist on his family name and a pun on the French word for “raven” in 1920, but signed his paintings “Jeanneret” throughout his career. The Swiss-born French architect, designer, painter, and writer carved out “a small niche in the history of modern painting as co-founder (with Ozenfant) of Purism in 1918.” Generally ranked among the best architects of the 20th century, he was a prolific illustrator, lithographer, designer of tapestries and furniture, and writer of books, pamphlets, and articles. (ODA, 340-41). One critic notes that Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929-30) is one of a number of “more aesthetically inclined European counterparts” to Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1928), and discusses the fundamental differences between the two designers: “Although both Fuller and Le Corbusier can be viewed as looking for an architectural expression of the machine age, Fuller devised a way to place machines at the service of the inhabitants, whereas Le Corbusier was more interested in using machines to achieve his ideal of artistic perfection” (I DA A).
¶ (Architecture) East Africa Institute of Architects. Jubilee Yearbook 1913-1963. Nairobi, Kenya: Guides and Handbooks of Africa Publishing Company, 1963.
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; white cloth; browned and soiled; photographic dust- jacket; edgeworn with two closed tears.
First edition of this compendium of essays, statistics, and advertisements compiled and edited by the East Africa Institute of Architects.
¶ (Architecture) Friedman, Yona. Toward a Scientific Architecture. Translated by Cynthia Lang. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, (1975).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First English translation and revision of the original French Vers une architecture scien- tifique (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond), with a new foreword.
¶ (Architecture) Heyer, Paul. ARCHITECTS ON ARCHITECTURE. New directions in America. New York: Walker and Company, (1966).
4to.; black and white photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; edgeworn; library label on spine.
First edition. Includes a chapter on Fuller, with illustrations of some of his key works on pages 378–387: an air-deliverable ten-deck building, a Dymaxion Car, a Dymaxion House, the Dome he proposed to cover a two mile section of New York City in 1950, Plastic Radomes, structural clouds, a U.S. Marine Corps Shelter, the U.S. Pavilion in Moscow, the Wichita House, and World Town Plan. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To R. Buckminster Fuller with my warmest regards. Paul Heyer.
THE EARLIEST ARCHITECTURE VOLUME IN THE LIBRARY
¶ (Architecture) Howe, George. Architectural Deflation OR the Practical and the Aesthetic in Modern Architecture. An address delivered before the Department of Architecture of the College of Fine Arts of New York University. November 13,1931. New York: 1932.
Slim 8vo.; black and white photographs; wrappers; stapled; browned.
First edition of this address delivered at the annual award ceremony at which the Societe des Architectes Diplomes confers the Medal for Excellence in Design; in 1931, it was awarded to the Department of Architecture at New York University.
A presentation copy, inscribed in pencil on the cover: To BF from Author. When Howe delivered this lecture he was fairly fresh from designing, or co-designing, the PSFS site at Market and Twelfth Streets in Philadelphia. (Authorship is still disputed, and is often attributed to or shared by William Lescaze.) Howe would go on to chair the Department of Architecture at Yale University, and to found Perspecta (1952), according to one critic “the first and still the most prestigious student architectural magazine.”
¶ (Architecture) (Johnson, Philip) Jacobus, John M. Jr. PHILIP JOHNSON. London and New York; Prentice-Hall International and George Braziller, Inc., (1962).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed.
First edition of this selection from “The Current Work of Philip Johnson,” by Henry- Russell Hitchcock, reprinted from Zodiac 7, 1961, and published simultaneously in the States and England. In 1932, Fuller invited Johnson to serve as guest editor of the first issue of his magazine Shelter.
In his discussion of Johnson’s work, Jacobus calls up a common criticism of Fuller for support when he notes, “Perhaps the most trouble of all is the Crutch of Structure”:
Like Bucky Fuller, who’s going around from school to schoolit’s like a hurricane, you can’t miss it if it’s coming: he talks, you know, for five or six hours, and he ends up that all architecture is nonsense, and you have to build something like discontinuous domes. The arguments are beautiful. I have nothing against discontinuous domes, but for goodness sakes, let’s not call it architecture. Have you ever seen Bucky trying to put a door into one of his domed buildings? He’s never succeeded, and wisely, when he does them, he doesn’t put any covering on them, so they are magnificent pieces of pure sculpture. Sculpture alone cannot result in architecture because architecture has problems that Bucky Fuller has not faced, like how do you get in and out. Structure is a very dangerous thing to cling to. You can be led to believe that clear structure clearly expressed will end up being architecture by itself…It’s a very nice crutch, you see, because, after all, you can’t mess up a building too badly if the bays are all equal and all the windows the same size. (pp. 116–17)
¶ (Architecture) Jones, Cranson. ARCHITECTURE Today and TOMORROW. New York: McGraw-Hill, (1961).
4to.; black and white and color photographs and illustrations; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; dust- jacket fragments loosely inserted; library label on spine.
First edition of this compendium, with a chapter on Fuller (pages 230–37) complete with fourteen photographs. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For BuckyWho has proven that the last shall be first and who radiates ideas and concepts as naturally as the sunLong live Buck! From a fellow Yankee, Cranston. With Fuller’s ownership signature above the inscription.
¶ (Architecture) (Kahn. Louis) Scully, Vincent Jr. Louis I. Kahn. London and New York: Prentice-Hall and George Braziller, (1962).
8vo.; over 100 black and white photographs and illustrations; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; dust- jacket; lightly used; library label on spine.
First edition; with “over 100 illustrations, plans, drawings, and photographs, together with a selection from the writings of the architect, complete bibliography, and chronology.” After years as a draftsman, designer, and architect, Estonia-born Louis Kahn (1901-1974) was finally able to build much of his work after achieving a public profile as a Yale professor starting in 1947. During his nine years therepart of which he spent as Resident Architect at the American Academy in Rome, at MIT, and at the University of Pennsylvaniahe realized much of the potential he had shown previously in his designs. Raised and educated from the age of four and trained almost exclusively in Philadelphia, most his designs prior to 1951 remained unbuilt. At Yale he was commissioned to design an art gallery in 1951 and, soon after, the Richard Medical Research Buildings at the University of Pennsylvania. His realized designs from 1951 on “showed how modern architecture could put on a human face,” and evinced a desire to “revitalis[e] the doctrine of functionalism” {Contemporary Architects). His best-known achievements include the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, the Performing Arts Theater at Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Institute of Management Studies at Ahmedabad, India, the National Assembly of Bangladesh, the Library at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, and the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth, Texas.
¶ (Architecture) Mallory, Keith and Arvid Ottar. ARCHITECTURE OF AGGRESSION. A history of military architecture in North West Europe 1900-1945. (London): Architectural Press, (1973).
Oblong 8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; white illustrated dust-jacket; lightly soiled and darkened; library label on spine.
First edition; a complimentary copy, with the publisher’s printed slip taped to the front endpaper.
Mallory and Ottar notes that the United States military expressed the earliest interest in and support of Fuller’s radomes and geodesic domes. They picture a “cluster” of his Dy- maxion Deployment Units that were used in the Persian Gulf during WWII as “dormitories for aviators and mechanics assembling US pursuit planes for delivery to Russia” (p. 271). They also include a photograph of Fuller “watching the US Marine Corps test helilift of his 10 metre wood and plastic Geodesic in North Carolina, Feb. 1, 1954” (p. 272), and excerpt and discuss at some length his analysis of the relationship between “architectural progress and military expenditure” (p. 287).
¶ (Architecture) Margariet, J. and C. Buxade. Las MALLAS ESPACI ALES EN ARQUITECTURA. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.A., (1972).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; photographic paper-covered boards.
First edition. With the publisher’s mailing label, addressed to Fuller and postmarked Barcelona, March 29, 1972, loosely inserted. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: A R. Buckminster Fuller con [ ] gratitude y afecto I Barcelona, Mayo 1972, and signed by both authors. With Fuller’s “Received” stamp on the front endpaper, dated May 12,1972.
¶ (Architecture) McLaughlin, Robert W. ARCHITECT: CREATING Man’s ENVIRONMENT. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
8vo.; 14 black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; edgeworn, small portion cut out of flap, not removing any text; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky with admiration and affection. Bob / Princeton I October 1962.
¶ (Architecture) Michaels, Leonard. Contemporary Structure in Architecture. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, (1950).
8vo.; black and white photographs; endpapers darkened; cloth; extremities frayed.
First edition of the first of Fuller’s works brought out by Reinhold; they would publish The Dymaxion World of Buckminister Fuller a decade later. A publisher’s presentation copy, with Fuller’s ownership signature on the front endpaper, and this note: Oct 20th 1950 I from Wm. AtkinArch. Editor of the publisher Reinhold Pub. Co.
¶ (Architecture) Nervi, Pier Luigi. AESTHETICS AND TECHNOLOGY IN BUILDING. Translated from the Italian by Robert Einaudi. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press, 1965.
8vo.; block and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; light edgewear; few small chips.
First edition of Nervi’s collection of Norton lectures delivered at Harvard. An Italian architect and engineer, Nervi (1891-1979) is perhaps most famous for his use of reinforced concrete in his architectural projects, through which he beat the path to an architecture of space over mass. His buildings seemed to soar in defiance of gravity, in ways previously prohibited by earlier building materials. Thanks to Nervi, reinforced concrete is now ubiquitous. Among his many architectural accomplishments, his stadium in Florence (1932) as well as his collaboration on the UNESCO building in Paris (1957) stand out.
¶ (Architecture) Peter,John, ed. Aluminum in Modern Architecture: An International Review. Louisville, KY: Reynolds Metals Company, 1958.
8vo.; printed on blue and white paper; edges of blue paper browned; black and white photographs and illustrations; silver endpapers; pictorial wrappers; rear panel rubbed; library label on spine.
An annual printed as a “companion to Aluminum in Modern Architecture” Volumes One and Two, and with an index to those volumes; Fuller is indexed on two pages of volume one.
¶ (Architecture) Prus, Victor, Architectural Concept; J. T. McCay, Overall Concept; Leon Simard, Sponsor. An International Centre for Advanced Studies in Human Development. (Montreal): N.P., n.d.
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; photographic paper covers, clear plastic cover, spiral bound; library label on spine.
First edition of this “preliminary plan,” printed in a limited run of numbered copies (limitation not stated); this copy is unnumbered. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To Ann and Bucky with our love Victor & Maria Prus.
¶ (Architecture) Redstone, Louis G. Art IN ARCHITECTURE. Introduction by Jacques Lipchitz. Foreword by Robert L. Durham, FAIA, President, the American Institute of Architects. New York: McGraw-Hill, (1968).
8vo.; black and white and color photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; small closed tear; two snags.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To Bucky, a great man and a wonderful person with warm personal regards. Louis Redstone March 8 ’70.
¶ (Architecture) Stone, Edward Durell. The EVOLUTION OF AN ARCHITECT. New York: Horizon Press, 1962.
Square 8vo.; pictorial endpapers; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly used.
First edition of Stone’s recapitulation of the years that shaped his aesthetic. A presentation copy, inscribed: To my friend ‘Bucky’ with admiration and affection. Ed.
i J in the earlv 1930s with the teams that designed New York’s Rockefeller Having wor e Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Radio City Music Hall, Stone
Xneand Associates m ™
°Xf the Museum of Modern Art “was hailed upon its completion as an embodiment Zlass and concrete of the art it was meant to extol. At the same t.me Stone built a house for the museum’s president, A. Conger Goodyear, in Old Westbury, N.Y, it was the first design in which Stone used the overhanging roof that would become a trademark.” Stone’s 1940 meeting with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West “converted him to acceptance of indigenous materials, a change reflected in the redwood exterior of a “House of Ideas” he built for Collier’s magazine later that year. He was also affected by his military experience; as a major in the United States Army Air Corps (1942-1945), Stone for the first time designed buildings for structure, not beauty.” In later works he sought to create the effect of weightlessness, as in his 1959 design of the New York Cultural Center at Columbus Circle. His most challenging commissions came at the peak of his career, and resulted in mixed success: these include the fifty-story General Motors Building in New York (1964-1968); the eighty-story Standard Oil Building (later the Amoco Building) in Chicago (1974); and the John E Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. (1971). “Throughout his forty-five year career, Stone fulfilled the architect’s prime directive: he gave his clients what they wanted. And occasionally …Stone could give his clients something more: an image of themselves and their ideals in stone, metal, and glass, set before the world for admiration” (Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 10: 1976-1980. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995).
¶ (Architecture) (Villanueva) Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. CARLOS Raijl VILLANUEVA. Y la arquitectura de Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Lectura, 1964.
Oblong 8vo., black and white and color photographs and illustrations; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; light edgewear; several small closed tears.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the frontispiece: Bora Buckminster Fuller con admiration y[],en recuerdo de su primera estadia en Caracas C.R. Villanueva I Caracas 128 de Novembre 64.
Largely self taught, Hungarian-born artist, photographer, and writer Laszlo Moholy- Nagy developed his technique under the influence of Karl Schwitters in early 1920s Berlin, of thpR b !i aS * Lexhibition\ in\ 1922- The following year he joined the faculty cal ressur B5 I R 1 u a J°Sef\ and “ Albers>in\ 1928\ under politi JX > ln b t ped\ Set\ designsas\ well\ as advertising campaigns, ty- BaSa^inPciTao0<sup>0</sup>^^ an/ 1937 he was invited direct the New sign (which became1\ he\ f°Unded\ his\ own School of\ De-
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¶ (Architecture) Von Eckardt, Wolf, editor. Mid-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE IN America.Honor awards of the American Institute of Architects, 1949–1961. Foreword by Philip Will, Jr. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, (1961).
4to.; black and white photographs; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; edgeworn.
First edition; with a printed card loosely inserted, “With the compliments of the American Institute of Architects.” Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper, with his note to “see pages 24, 20. ” On page 24 his geodesic dome is referenced; on page 20 he is quoted at length on the pressing need for a dymaxion approach to home design: “As World War II threatened …Buckminster Fuller complained at about that time, and not without justice, that the new architecture ‘only looked at problems of modification of the surface of end-products, which end-products were inherently sub-functions of a technically obsolete world.’ Two decades later our engineers and manufacturers are still far from the dymaxion world of Fuller… ”
¶ (Architecture) Vostell, Wolf and Dick Higgins. FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE. (Millerton, NY): Something Else Press, (1971).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; photographic dust-jacket.
First edition of this “anthology of architectural ideas by artists” (press release, loosely inserted). With a three-inch square black and white photograph of Fuller included in a portrait gallery in the rear: “Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller, b. 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts I lives in USA.”
¶ (Architecture) (Wright, Frank Lloyd) Manson, Grant Carpenter. Frank Lloyd WRIGHT to 1910. The First Golden Age. With a foreword by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, (1958).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; wear to extremities.
First edition. With two color snapshots of Fuller and Wright loosely inserted into a Buckminster Fidler Institute envelope affixed to the front pastedown. A Xerox typed letter signed by the photographer, Vern Knutson, loosely inserted, explaining them: “…I took the photographs during the winter of 1957–58 at Taliesin West in Arizona. Mrs. Fuller later wrote me that Bucky always carried on him the photo of he and Mr. Wright where they were both reaching upward.”
One of Fuller’s houses is mentioned in this volume (p. 173). On June 16,1930, Fuller wrote to a mutual friend that he looked forward “with enthusiasm to the possibility of meeting Mr. Wright at some time.” The following year they were impaneled together at the University Club of New York, and by 1932 Wright was contributing articles to Fuller’s short-lived Shelter Magazine. “By August 1932,” reports George T. Potter, who documented this relationship through research in the archive at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, “they were on a first name basis and had a high regard for each other…Both wrote letters supportive of the other’s endeavors…Frank had already reached the conclusion that he was to repeat many times in future yearsthat ‘I am an architect interested in science, and Buckminster is a scientist who is interested in architecture.’ ” At Fuller’s request, Wright promoted his first book, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), with a superlative re minster Fuller by the staff of the Department of Architecture as a token of their appreciation and esteem.” The dedication copy, inscribed by each of the Studio Masters: With Best Regards, and many thanks for much needed inspiration and “zest. ” Getting to know you as a man, as luell as a lecturer, has been a high point in my experience. Thomas R. Callaway. And, With much gratitude for being privileged to hear your exposition of a practical philosophy which by the simple expression given to it manifests a great mind, and throws light on so many problems; and with respectful affection for a most admirable gentleman. Don Dyke-Wells.
¶ (Art) Covarrubias, Miguel. ISLAND OF Bali. With an album of photographs by Rose Covarrubias. New York: Knopf, 1965.
Large 8vo.; illustrated; color frontispiece; pull-out map of Bali in the front; cloth; dust-jacket; price-clipped; edgeworn; spine rubbed and chipped, removing “Is” from “Island” on cover.
A later edition of Covarrubias’s best-selling book, the result of nine months of research in Bali following his 1929 wedding and South Pacific honeymoon. With Fuller’s lengthy note on the front endpaper:
Dec 7 1971 Bali, Indonesia. Buckminster Fuller. This book was illustrated and written by my friend Miguel Covarrubias and photo illustrated by his wife Rose. He gave me a copy of it which is in our library in Carbondale, Illinois, USA but I wanted an additional copy to read here in Bali so purchased it at the Bali Beach Hotel. Miguel died in the 1940s [1957] and Rose died two years ago just after making her last trip to Bali on which occasion we had planned to go together but I was suddenly shunted in another direction. B. Fuller.
With Fuller’s additional notes on the fold-out map, the blank opposite, and the half- title, discussing his Balinese adventures; signatures and addresses of Balinese friends on the rear endpapers; and with three black and white snapshots loosely inserted.
A 1967 visit to Bali had a profound emotional impact. His native hosts had no problem inviting him “to hike up a volcanic mountain, which was constantly being pounded by rainstorms,” nor to return down the same slick terrain. Though in his eighth decade, he had no problem accepting, provided he had assistance, so they made him a bamboo walking stick en route.
The following morning the guide approached Fuller and said, “All of us, we Balinese, are saying that you are not a stranger. You were here long, long ago and you have just come back to us. So I have set aside a room in my house and put your staff in it. Nobody will ever go into that room again because your cane is there.”
Fuller was touched by this gesture, and later explained, “I said to myself, this is a very mysterious thing. All those years and all those things that have happened since little Alexandra died. Now somehow I feel intuitively that this is a kind of message. That she has her cane at last” (Sieden, p. 79).
Miguel Covarrubias achieved quick fame while still in his teens for his vivid and unique caricatures, which began appearing in Vanity Fair, the New York World, Tribune, and Herald within a year of his emigrating from Tizapan, Mexico to New York City. However, like Fuller, he found success and fulfillment in a variety of fields: most notably anthropology, but also writing, painting, and set design. His first book of caricaturesThe Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans (1925)was widely hailed, though D.H. Lawrence dissented, calling it “hideous without mirth or whimsicality.” His second, and most enduring collection, Negro Drawings (1927), drew less enthusiasm, but by then he had added many magazines to his roster, including Theatre Magazine and the then-fledgling New Yorker, assuring him a wide audience. “In addition,” writes Edward Sorel, “he was illustrating books and book jackets, creating theatre posters for productions in new York and Paris, designing costumes and sets for George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, organizing exhibits of his work, and traveling to North Africa for fresh subjects to sketch and paint” (“Covarrubias,” American Heritage, 46.8 (December 1995) pp. 92–100).
Covarrubias and his wife moved back to Mexico, where their home became a magnet for notable visitors, including Diego Rivera, Georgia O’Keeffe, Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, Tyrone Power, John Huston, Merce Cunningham, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Amelia Earhart and Nelson Rockefeller. After a 1950 visit to New York to help curate the collection of the United Nations, Covarrubias returned to Mexico permanently; “with the country in the clutches of McCarthyism, he was labeled a threat to national security” (ibid.).
¶ (Art) Dali, Salvador. DlARY OF A Genius. Foreword and Notes by Nichel Deon. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965.
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; damp stained at heel of spine; dust-jacket; rubbed; lightly soiled; light edgewear.
First English translation of Journal D’un Genie (Paris: Table Ronde, 1964). A presentation copy, signed across the title page, Dali, and inscribed across the half-title and facing page in Dali’s large print: Vive Fuller/LeFou Le Genie de L’Air; “ledivin”; “A bientota Cadaque”; Vive la Mort de Corbu! Le plus lourd de touas le ciments armes qui nous [ ]; 1966.
Dali was so taken with the geodesic dome as pictured by Time magazine in their January 10,1964 cover story on Fuller that he became obsessed with the idea that his own museum should be, according to a scholar at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, “built upon the foundations of the old municipal theatre and …capped off with a Fuller dome.” The two met several times over the next five years to discuss the idea.
Dali had asked Piero for a collapsible glass window that would separate the garden from the stage, measuring 16x8 meters, on which Dali would paint an enormous Christ which would appear like an apparition as the window unfolded. Dali showed the first stages of this work to Bucky and Alle- gra on a visit they made to his home in Port-Lligat, Caduceus, north of Barcelona, Spain, in July of 1966.
“The dome became a reality in the mid-1970s.”
Another genius at moving with fluidity through varied mediahis were painting, sculpture, graphic arts, design, film, and literature Salvador Dali (1904-89) lived and studied in Madrid but became an international sensation early on, as a loud promoter of himself and of the Surrealist movement. Andre Breton had effected Dali’s unofficial induction into that movement in 1929, the year he wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue accompanying Dali’s Paris show. Dali’s primary modus operandi was “critical paranoia,” a phrase he coined to describe a phenomenon of incorporating dreamscapes into natural scenarios.
In 1939 Breton revoked Dali’s membership in the Surrealist movementto which Dali had contributed some iconographic imageryciting a combination of his conservative political views and his increasingly conservative artistic style. Dali lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948, during which time he revived his work in film. Having collaborated with fellow Spaniard Bunuel in 1929 {Un chien andalou} and 1930 (L’Age d’or}, Dali designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1944. He spent the second half of his life in Spain, Paris and New York, producing sculpture, book illustration, jewelry and theatre design, as well as several volumes of rambling autobiography.
¶ (Art) (da Vinci) Steinitz, Kate Trauman and Margot Archer. MANUSCRIPTS OF Leonardo DA Vinci. Their history, with a description of the manuscript editions in facsimile. Los Angeles: The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana, 1948.
8vo.; illustrated; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; light wear to top edge.
First edition. A gift from the publisher, inscribed on the front endpaper: For R. Buckminster Fuller from Elmer Belt with great admiration. With a typescript carbon table of contents affixed to the front pastedown.
Fuller met Elmer Belt and Kate Steinitz (1889-1975) through his son-in-law Robert Snyder, who first encountered them in 1951 Los Angeles where he had ventured to pick up his Academy Award for The Titan, his film on Michelangelo. Their friendship survived until the Snyders finally moved to the West Coast, and expanded to include Fuller, with whom Kate worked on the Save the Watts Towers Committee. Later they co-sponsored a young Italian student, Carlo Pedretti, now one of the leading da Vinci scholars in the world.
An alum of the Academic und Studienateliers fuer Malerei und Plastik (connected with the Berlin Secession), the Ecole de la Grand Chaumiere, and the Sorbonne, Steinitz was quite literally at the center of the Hannover Dada movement during the 1920s and early 1930s; so renowned were her friends that a guestbook she kept at her home was later published. Names such as Kurt Schwittersa friend and collaboratorLissitzky, Moholy- Nagy, and Van Doesberg appeared regularly. In the mid-thirties, her work proscribed in Germany, she joined her husband in the United States, and worked for several years as a freelance artist, researcher, and academic, organizing in 1940 the “New Americans” exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. In the mid 1940s she moved to Los Angeles, where she lived until her death in 1975, devoting the final three decades of her career to scholarly work at the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana.
¶ (Art) (de Kooning, Willem) Carandente, Giovanni. WlLLEM DE KOONING: DlSEG- NI. XII Festival dei due Mondi. 28 giugno-13 luglio 1969. Spoleto: Palazzo Ancaiani, 1969.
8vo.; 15 black and white reproductions in rear; text printed in English and Italian; photographic wrappers, perfect bound; edges lightly scuffed.
First edition of this dual-language exhibition catalogue printed to coincide with the European debut of 37 de Kooning drawings executed between 1968 and 1969. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To Bucky with love Bill July 7–1969 Spoleto.
Willem de Kooning (1904–97), a leading force in Abstract Expressionism, had unlikely beginnings as a 12-year-old apprentice in commercial art and decorating in Rotterdam, later training at the Rotterdam Academy. At 22 he stowed away to New York where he worked as a carpenter and house painter to make ends meet. In 1935 the Federal Art Project gave him his real start as a professional artist and he never looked back. Under the influence of his close friend Arshile Gorky he developed his signature style. His first solo exhibition, in 1948 at New York’s Egan Gallery, established him at the forefront, with Jackson Pollock, of Abstract Expressionism. That summer, John Cage brought him to the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he met Fuller. It was during that now-legendary session that Fuller unveiled a sample geodesic dome, hastily constructed with makeshift materials. Fuller “captivated everyone with his ‘comprehensivist’ thinking and his experimental geodesic dome, made of Venetian blind slats and bolts, which failed to stand up when assembled; Fuller had said in advance that it probably wouldn’t (the materials weren’t right), and blithely referred to the experiment as ‘the supine dome’ ” (Duber- man,p. 31). Fuller and de Kooning became, in Fuller’s words, “great friends, really extraordinary friends,” and mutual admirers. Fuller told Duberman: “Bill is a very, very wonderful thinker” (ibid., p. 283).
¶ (Art) Hayes, Bartlett H. Jr. The Naked Truth and Personal Vision. A Discussion about the Length of the Artistic Road. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1955.
4to.; black and white and color plates and illustrations; brown cloth; library label on spine; dust-jacket; rubbed; light edgewear; library label on spine.
First edition of this follow-up to an exhibition mounted in 1952 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, designed “less to explain the works of art than, by means of them, to examine certain ways of thinking by which painters and sculptors (and, incidentally writers and musicians) are often guided…. The pattern of the book consists of short side trips to expressive viewpoints that are posted with specific information. Readers who are interested in the view alone may prefer to ignore the sign-posts. There are others who, at home with words, may find in these paragraphs a way by which they can journey into the less familiar territory of creative vision. It is for them that the volume is especially intended” (p. 5). A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: for Bucky from Bart. July 25, 1963.
¶ (Art) (Marin, John.) JOHN Marin. Edited by Cleve Gray. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.)
4to.; black and white and color plates; cloth; dust-jacket; top edge browned and warped; one small closed tear.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: 6/20/72 For Bucky Fuller May we have many more wonderful daysAlways the best, John, Norma & Lisa Marin.
After a decade-long false start in architecture, during which he designed several houses including his own, Marin began his formal training in art at the age of 28 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Finding “the prevailing academic approach unproductive” he left for the Art Students League in New York City, and then moved to Paris (making several trips throughout Europe over the next several years), where his sales, shows, and publications of his paintings and etchings grew steadily. His career really took-off, however, when he met the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz showed Marin’s work in 1908 in his gallery, 291, with that of Alfred Maurer; in 1909 he gave Marin a solo exhibition. Subsequent shows include a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936, and a one-man exhibition in the 1950 Venice Biennale.
¶ (Art) Pope, Arthur Upham ed. A SURVEY OF PERSIAN Art. From Prehistoric Times to the Present. Tehran: Soroush Press, (1964-77).
16 vols., 4to.; hundreds of full-page, full color plates; blue cloth.
Third edition of this series originally published in the 1930s and rarely found complete. Published under the auspices of Shahabanu, it includes six volumes of text, eight of plates, and two of bibliography.
Inscribed to Fuller by Prince Chahram Pahlavi: To Bucky I To the Universal ‘Man’ C. Pahlavi / D’Arros 10 March 1978. Underneath the inscription Fuller has added a lengthy explanation of the circumstances of the presentation by Prince Chahram Pahlavi, signed and dated 8/10/1978, as follows:
Given to me on the island ofD’arros in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean by Prince Chahram Pahlavi (signature above) ] of Iran who with his Princess Neeloufar bought D’Arros and aided by James George (former Canadian High Commissioner to India and subsequently Canadian Ambassador to Iran then retired from statecraft to join with Prince Chahram) have established a colony for accommodating world around thinkers and doers meetings out of which has come their “Threshold Publishing and Movie-TV production non-profit world enterprise who are now to produce a t.v. series of Synergetics. Buckminster Fuller 3/10/1978
Prince Chahram’s mother wife of the Shah of Iran, sponsored various activities to draw architects to their country. Fuller’s grandson Jaime Snyder recalls having attended one such event with Fuller - a large architectural conference - in the fall of 1973 in Shiraz, Iran, near Persepolis: “all of the world’s top architects were invited and attended” (email to GHB, October 2003). While Persian scholar Arthur Upham Pope started writing his survey of Persian art in the early 1930s, the final volume appeared just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Acclaimed by scholars and critics alike, it was an immediate sue- cess, and after some years the entire edition was exhausted. A 1964 reissue sold out immediately. This third edition was published in 1977, on the eve of the overthrow of the Iranian Shaw, eerily reminiscent of its earlier publication just at the start of second world war.
Arthur Upham Pope officially began the project in 1926, by photographing Iranian artisans at their craft. Later he employed several photographers and illustrators to comprehensively reproduce Persian artifacts. The massive undertaking was moving at a snail’s pace when popular success of the great exhibition of Persian art held at Burlington House in 1931 gave it a meaningful push. To date it remains the benchmark survey of the architecture and arts of Iran. Its ambitions, however, went further, and its interpretation of Iranian cultural history retains scholarly value.
¶ (Art) (Reder) Rewald, John. SCULPTURES AND WOODCUTS OF Reder. (Florence): Sansoni Editore, (1957).
8vo.; 46 full-page black and white photographs of sculptures and woodcuts; cloth; photographic dust- jacket; round sticker on spine; rear panel rubbed; edgeworn, with a few chips and closed tears.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed by Reder opposite the title page: To Mr. and Mrs. Buckminster Fuller cordially Reder. N.Y. March 1960.
¶ Ashby, W. Ross. DESIGN FOR A Brain. New York: John Wiley 8c Sons, 1952.
8vo.; cloth; lightly rubbed; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper, with a note docketed “Boston, August 14, 1954”: recommended by Mr. Robert Woodbery.
¶ (Australia) (Utzon, Joern) Anonymous. Utzon and the Sydney Opera House. Statement in the public interest. (Sydney: Morgan Publications, 1967.)
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; illustrated wrappers; perfect bound; library label on spine.
First edition of this “public statement” discussing the history of the Sydney Opera House, including chapters addressing accusations against the government and Utzon; Utzon’s organizational approach; the delays in construction; the soaring costs; Utzon’s practicality; the government’s action; and a possible solution. The appendices include “plywood mock-ups,” “seating,” “chronology,” “Utzon’s reputation,” and “the resignation.” With related plans, illustrations, photographs, and cartoons from both The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald throughout.
¶ Baird, Bil. The Art of the Puppet. New York: Macmillan, (1965).
4to.; full color illustrated double title page; color and black and white photographs on nearly every page; cloth; colorful illustrated dust-jacket; head bumped; library label on spine.
First edition of this history of puppetry as part of a global culture, recounted by a master in the art. “Along the way, he examines the famous and outrageous Mr. Punch, the raucous Karaghioz, the noble knights of the Orlando legend, the lovely shadow plays of Asia, the unique Bunraki puppets of Japan, and the exciting developments in today’s puppetry around the world” (dust-jacket).
A presentation copy, inscribed on the copyright page by one of Fuller’s closest friends: For Bticky & Anne New York June 1970 from Bil & Pat, with an illustration in black, red, and green marker of a boy pushing a geodesic dome. The mailing label by which the book was shipped to Fuller in Carbondale, IL from “Bil Baird’s Marionettes” in New York is loosely inserted.
Fuller and Baird met at Romany Marie’s, the cafe in Greenwich Village first at Minetta Lane, later at Washington Square Southwhere avant garde thinkers from every discipline met and encouraged each other’s work. Marie provided Fuller, according to his daughter Allegra, a “home away from home,” and regular square meals on the house. Fuller wrote, “It was probably the last of the really great Bohemian cafes I know of in the world, very much like the Paris of the ‘20s. The Village was loaded then with great artists and great intellectuals, and Marie had by far the best place in town. That’s where I carried on and developed my ideas. Certainly, in Greenwich Village they took me and my ideas seriously’’ (BFI.org). It’s no wonder he felt at ease there: it was decorated with furniture he built, lighted by his design, and filled with new friends artists, writers, and philosopherswho nurtured his evolving ideas. He was excited by what he called their “integrity of communication”: for Fuller, the definition of art. He later stated that there “has never been a large public meeting place of the artist-pioneer-explorer types since that time, to my knowledge, in America” (Hatch, p. 112). And it is at Romany Marie’s that Fuller began his seminal relationship with Isamu Noguchi.
The hours Baird spent at Marie’s are less well documented, but it is likely that there he refined the career that had developed from his boyhood hobby. Trained by pioneering puppeteer Tony Sarg, he developed his own style through over two thousand characters, for which he would become known worldwidefrom television, to film, to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Paradeand for the government as well, serving as “a cruising ambassador of puppetry for the State Department in India, Russia, Afghanistan, and Nepal” (dust-jacket).
INSCRIBED BY HERBERT BAYER
¶ Bayer, Herbert, edited and designed. World Geographic Atlas. A composite of man’s environment. (Chicago): Container Corporation of America, 1953.
4to.; maps; fore-edge gilt; cloth.
New edition, reflecting the political, social, economic, and geographic changes effected during the Second World War since the original 1936 edition. In an introductory letter, the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America explains: “Design has been a vital part of the activities of Container Corporation of America. The rather unique methods of presentation used in this atlas are in character with the principles of design and visualization employed by this company in its products, offices, factories, and advertising.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Bucky Fuller with many thanks for your contribution from a less advanced amateur geographer. Herbert Bayer. Aspen, 1953. Signed by Fuller, and by his daughter Allegra Snyder, on the same page.
Bayer’s inscription stretches the definition of modesty. By 1953, the Austrian-born Bauhaus-trained designer, architect, and author whose influence on the look of American advertising borders on legendary, had an international reputation. His work is now housed in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide.
In 1947 Walter Paepke, President of the Container Corporation, approached Herbert Bayer to design a new world atlas, the aim of which was to provide the most efficient organization of information about the world and its resources. After three years of research, Bayer began production. The time consuming project dragged on for another three years, during which many eminent designers and intellectuals were consulted to assist. Fuller, who had performed his own research into human organizational needs, was of great assistance to Bayer. They met frequently in Aspen, home of the Paepke sponsored design conference, between 1951 to 1953, and in 1953 the World Geo-Graphic Atlas was published in an edition of 30,000 copies, none of which were for sale. Its achievement as an effective atlas as well as an exemplar of design was universally recognized. It was voted one of the 50 books of the year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1953, and the first edition was immediately exhausted.
¶ Benet, Stephen Vincent. John Brown’s Body. With illustrations by Fritz Kredel and Warren Chappell. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., (1954).
8vo.; illustrations; pictorially stamped paper-covered boards, cloth spine; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; small chip.
First edition of this illustrated edition of this Pulitzer Prize-winning work. With Fuller’s note on the front endpaper: Buckminster Fuller June 4–1979 Given me by Hetty Hewlett [Stearns] from her library because Stephen Vincent Benet and his brother Bill Benet were friends of mine. As Fuller notes in this inscription, Stephen Vincent Benet was the brother of William Rose Benet; for more on his relationship to Fuller, see the following entry.
A valentine’s day gift from bill BENl-T
¶ Benet, William Rose. Moons of Grandeur. A Book of Poems. New York: George H. Doran Company, (1920).
8vo.; grey half cloth; wear to extremities.
First edition of this collection by another intimate of Christopher Morley and fellow member of the Three Hours for Lunch Club that met at the Gotham Book Mart. A presentation copy, exuberantly inscribed on the front endpaper alternately in red and blue pencil, with several hearts drawn within and around the inscription: This old book is now for the Buckling and signed for him by [page is cut out so that author’s name from title page shows through] Old John Suckling This, for him, on Valentine’s Day was signed by good old Bill Benet. Written below, in the same hand: Ex Libris R. Buckminster Fuller, and on the pastedown: “Time, the dark whale spouts blithely from his spiracle" see p. 165 [where that line of the poem “To My Father” is underlined] (And be a Satyr in the Elevator) WRB. In grey pencil he has written, “I will explore the thirteenth floor. Robert Entwhistle The Marvelous Object cir. 1897” and in red and blue on cover: “Ex Libris R.B.F. 1939.”
In addition, Benet turned this into a copy of the “1939 Gotham Book Mart edition,” altering the title page accordingly, and scrawling on and opposite the dedication page several humorous quotes from himself, Christopher Morley, and presumably other members of the Gotham Book Mart crowd.
¶ Bennis, Warren. The UNCONSCIOUS CONSPIRACY. Why Leaders Can’t Lead. (New York): Amacom, (1976).
8vo.; black paper-covered boards; edgeworn; back cover creased.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: 1124176 To BuckyNostalgia for Buffalo days, Hawaii, and John McHale, Cage, & Dixon. Please come over the house after your lecture. Cornelia & Lukas Foss are at the house. Best, Warren Bennis.
Fuller’s daughter Allegra traces this inscription possibly to one of four or five meetings of the Young President’s Organization. In 1980, the psychologist, consultant, and prolific economist known for his behaviorist-based management theories would join the management faculty of the University of Southern California, however on February 24, 1976the date of this inscriptionBennis was the President of the University of Cincinnati. Fuller lectured that day at Thomas More College in Kentucky, a ten minute drive away. Hence, Bennis’s request that he “come over to the house after vour lecture.” As for Ben- nis’s nostalgia, it encompasses British architect and futurist John McHale who taught at Carbondale in the 1960s with Fuller; John Cage; and Fuller’s first assistant Dixon, a student who traveled with him for a few years in the early 1950s.
¶ Berghell, A.B. PRODUCTION Engineering IN THE AIRCRAFT INDUSTRY. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944.
8vo.; blue cloth; light wear.
First edition, second printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller With the admiration and regards of the author. Alfred B. Berghell Jan. 6,1959.
¶ Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. Problems of Life. An Evaluation of Modern Biological and Scientific Thought. New York: Harper Torchbooks, (1960).
8vo.; illustrated wrappers; light wear.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: For Mr. Buckminster Fuller in admirationBertalanffy.
Fuller refers regularly in his writings to Bertalanffy, arguably the most significant figure in theoretical biology during the first half of the 20th century, especially in connection with the General Semantics. It seems likely that they corresponded and perhaps met during the 1950s, when Bertalanffy was a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California (1955-58) and at the Menninger Foundation (1958-60).
¶ Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General SYSTEMS Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller, (1968).
8vo.; green cloth.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Bill Fuller [sic] in sincere friendship, Cordially Ludwig v. B. March 1969. With a contemporary ownership signature on the front endpaper. Several pages have been dog-eared or adorned with light marginal pencil lines, possibly Fuller’s.
¶ Brattinga, Pieter. Planning for Industry, Art and Education. Introduced by Louis Dorfsman and Theo Crosby. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, (1970).
8vo.; black and white and color plates; white cloth; dust-jacket; small closed tear to head of spine, else near fine.
First edition of Brattinga’s documentation of three of his large-scale design projects in industry, art, and education, presented for the edification of designers and design enthusiasts. Includes several of his lectures, and over 150 illustrations.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To Bucky from Pieter with his signature beneath. With a typed letter carbon from Fuller’s secretary to Brattinga acknowledging the gift. Loosely inserted is an envelope with a “Nederland” stamp, postmarked “29.VI.71,” and the publisher’s printed card stamped “with compliments” and signed by Brattinga.
¶ Cage, John. Silence: LECTURES AND WRITINGS. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1961).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; price-clipped; rubbed; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition of this collection of essays and lectures. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Dear Bucky, I am writing a poem on your name (a mesostic: row down the middle) and the next time I see you I’ll give it to you or write it here. In the meantime: my devotion always to you and my gratitude for all you’ve given. John. With a note on the half-title: With my greatest respect T[atyana] Grosman West Islip, N.Y. 9.5.75. (Formore on Grosman’s relationship with Fuller, see item #150, Particular Passions.
Arguably the most influential American composer of the 20th century, John Cage (1912–1992), like Fuller, developed his aesthetics through the inter-relation of media. In the early ‘30s, while traveling on the Continent, he had dabbled in art and architecture, but returned to the United States with a renewed focus on music. From 1925 he studied with Arnold Schoenberg, and in the late ’30s sought, unsuccessfully, a post at Black Mountain College. In 1942, “having begun his work with the ‘prepared’ piano (inserting bolts, screws and leather straps to produce percussive sound), Cage proposed to Black Mountain that he establish a Center for Experimental Music there,” but was turned down for lack of funds (Duberman, p. 277). In the early ‘40s he headed to New York, where he entered the orbit of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell.
After he debuted three of his musical compositions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, opportunities to perform opened upnot surprisingly, to limited applause. Conservative critics felt that his pieces, often accompaniments to the revolutionary choreography of Merce Cunningham, could only debatably be classified as music. By the end of the decade, however, Cage stood on firmer ground, with teaching positions at the Subjects of the Artists School (1948-49), and, finally, at Black Mountain College (1948–52). These posts allowed him to pursue his interests in varied, but overlapping, disciplines, and introduced him to a rising generation of artists; most notable among his proteges would be Robert Rauschenberg.
Cage was introduced into the Black Mountain community in April 1948, when he and Cunningham performed together, with Cage offering somewhat opaque insights into their creative processes. “The Alberses were present during the Cage-Cunningham visit… and, according to Cage, ‘willing to go whole hog’ with the views he expressed. Only later, in the early fifties, when Cage took the path of chance and ‘indeterminacy,’ was the sympathy and friendship between the two men broken; at that time Albers told Cage that he had renounced his responsibility as an artist’ ” (Duberman, p. 278). Cage and Cunningham went back to New York determined to revisit Black Mountain for the summer session, having been offered a standing invitation. They brought Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and at the same time Albers brought Fuller aboard. This circle of luminaries created a Black Mountain season that has become a high spot in the not insubstantial mythology of the college. Cunningham later recollected the most striking element of that summer: “The way all these people in different fields could get together and couldnot work together, but discuss and be together as people, sharing ideas or sharing conversation or whatnot. Not in any way separated. Like Fuller and de Kooning and Cage and myself” (ibid., p. 284).
In addition to teaching “The Structure of Music and Choreography,” Cage prepared a series of concerts of Erik Satie, culminating in “a blaze of vanguard glory with the production of Satie’s pre-World War I play, Le Piege de Meduse, translated for the occasion by Black Mountain’s literature and writing teacher, Mary Caroline Richards, directed by a talented student named Arthur Penn, and starring Elaine de Kooning as Medusa, Cunningham as a ‘mechanical monkey,’ and Bucky Fuller as the Baron Medusa” (Kostelanetz, Richard, ed.John Cage. New York: Praeger, 1970, p. 31).
Cage later examined the impact of the friendship he developed with Fuller that summer and sustained throughout their lives: “The work and thought of Buckminster Fuller is of prime importance to me. He more than any other to my knowledge sees the world situationall of itclearly and has fully reasoned projects for turning our attention away from ‘killingry’ toward ‘livingry’ ” (foreword to A Year from Monday, see item #68). In turn, Fuller attributed much of his later performance style to his role in the Satie play specifically, to Penn’s expert coaching: “Art Penn did me one of the greatest favors of my life …[he] let me learn to be myself on the stage … he freed me up. And I imagine this has helped me a very great deal in my thinking-out-loud sessions” (ibid., p. 290).
¶ Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1961).
8vo.; cloth; library label on spine; dust-jacket; lightly used; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky my favorite John / Carbondale June ‘66.
¶ Cage, John. A Year FROM MONDAY. New lectures and writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1967).
8vo.; cloth; tips bumped; library label on spine; dust-jacket; wear to extremities.
First edition. With Fuller’s note on the half-title: Buckminster Fuller from his daughter Al- legra Xmas 1967 and written by my “wonderful” friend John Cage. Fuller’s ideas permeate several of Cage’s writings; in the first piece, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965,” he summarizes one of Fuller’s sentiments in bold print caps: “Fuller: As long as one human being is hungry, the entire human race is hungry” (5).
¶ Cage, John. A Year FROM MONDAY. New lectures and writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1967).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed by Fuller on the half-title. A complimentary copy, with a typed acknowledgement letter carbon from Fuller’s secretary.
¶ (Cage, John) Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage. New York: Praeger, (1970).
8vo.; illustrated; cloth; bottom edge sunned; dust-jacket; rubbed, abrasion to cover removing “Joh” from “John”; head bumped; round sticker on spine.
First edition of this book dedicated to Fuller, whose ideas are frequently referenced by Cage in his interview and essays: seven of his books are included on the list of “books and essays relevant, in various ways, to Cage’s endeavors,” and he is index on nearly two dozen pages.
¶ Cage, John. Empty WORDS. Writings ‘73-’78. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1979).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper.
¶ Campbell, Joseph, ed. Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art AND Civilization. Bollingen Series VI. Tulsi Shah Enterprises, Distributors for India. (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963.)
8vo.; green cloth; dust-jacket; wear to extremities; spine sunned; library label on spine.
First edition, fourth printing. A presentation copy from Joseph Campbell, the editor, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky: With warmest regards Joe. With the stamp of a New Delhi business at the foot of that page.
Joseph Campbell’s prolific careers as a writer, scholar, and educator have all taken a backseat to his celebrity as a television personality. Influential as a perceptive interpreter of the semiotics behind myths, his charismatic personality and engaging writing style put him on the best-seller list, and landed him a lucrative stint on the lecture circuit. Two of his most famous books, The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, provided the basis for his highly influential and popular PBS series. As a critical thinker, the merit of his works continues to be hotly debated, but a handful of his books have achieved the rank of minor classics in the field and are regularly found on college syllabi.
Campbell was a friend of Fuller’s as well as of his son-in-law, Robert Snyder and daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder. She conjectures that “Joe and Daddy probably first met around the Martha Graham Company. Daddy was frequently around rehearsals as well as Joe, who was courting Jean Erdman, later his wife, then in the Company.”
Stephen and Robin Larsen write in A Fire in the Mind, their biography of Campbell (New York: Doubleday, 1991):
In the fall of 1968, the Young Presidents’ Organization invited Campbell to speak at the same conference with Buckminster Fuller in Bermuda…. Campbell and Fuller were scheduled at the same time, so they could not attend each other’s lectures. However, there was time between scheduled events for them to meet, and they talked nonstop. Fuller’s mind ranged easily between mathematics, physics, economics, and ecology, whereas Campbell’s expertise was in other fields: mythology, psychology, and literature. On this occasion Fuller was talking about the role of the “speed of light” as a myth, a piece of knowledge known only to our century, which had transformed our entire way of thinking about the universe; and Campbell was enraptured by Fuller’s brilliance …Campbell thereafter spoke of Fuller with reverence as one of the most truly original thinkers he had ever met, and often made use of Fuller’s concept of “synergy” in explaining the dynamics of myth where the concept served as well as it did in biology or physics.
¶ (City Planning) Master Plan for Reykjavik 1962–83. Foreword by the Lord Mayor. Reykjavik: City of Reykjavik, 1966.
4to.; black and white and color maps, plans, and photographs; cloth; sleeve in rear with folded charts, maps, and plans; library label on spine; publisher s cardboard slipcase.
First edition of this dual-language volume, each page printed in both Icelandic and English. A gift, inscribed on the front endpaper: To R. Buckminster Fuller with regards T. Valsson. An elaborate and ambitious production.
¶ (City Planning) Gee! Group for Environmental Education, Inc. Our Man-Made Environment Book Seven. (Philadelphia: Geel, 1970.)
8vo.; unidentified ownership signature on first leaf; ten pages of “punch outs” and several leaves of tracing paper inserted into a flap in the rear; illustrated; photographic wrappers; stapled; one crease.
Revised edition number two.
¶ (City Planning) Wall, Donald. VISIONARY CITIES: The ARCHEOLOGY OF Paolo Soleri. New York …: Praeger, 1971.
8vo.; graphically and photographically illustrated, with several fold-outs; cloth; dust-jacket, light edgewear.
Advance reading copy, with the publisher’s printed slip dated August 20,1971 loosely inserted. This was presented by the publishers in the hope that Fuller would offer some printable praise, and has their greeting, specially printed for Fuller, clipped to the dust- jacket: along the right edge it reads in large letters “Fuller Fuller,” and the text of the message reads,
You’re stake in architecture / systems philosophy / graphic communication / education is well known and we believe the accompanying book makes a substantial contribution in these areas. Otherwise Praeger wouldn’t bother sending it and wasting your time. Visionary Cities obviously cuts across those traditional boundaries separating documentation from illustration by allowing typography to serve as visual information. The approach is decidedly abstract and architectonic. Yet, since so few literary critics are graphic sensitive, the book is bound to be misunderstood. Quite candidly we are hoping for a few championing remarks from you no matter how brief or fragmentary they may be. Sincerely yours Brenda Gilchrist [and signed],
Bucky and Gilchrist’s brother John toyed with the idea of collaborating on a book about Maine entitled “The Bear Island Story.” Though Allegra Fuller Snyder recalls a draft of the text, the project was never completed.
¶ (Computer Science) Nelson, Theodor H. COMPUTER Lib. [Privately published], (1974).
4to.; illustrated wrappers; very light wear.
First edition of this guide to understanding computers and computing, including articles, technical lessons, and resource guides for all aspects of computer ownership and use. The volume is divided roughly in half. The first section ends with page 69, at which point the reader much turn the book “upside down” and begin again, using the lower panel as the cover for the second part. The title of the second work is “Dream Machines.” With Fuller’s note on the cover, See 34, on which Nelson uses the concept of “Bucky’s Wristwatch” as a problem to solve using his FIDO computer:
Bucky’s Wristwatch
There is a certain folk hero whom the people all call Bucky. It is said that he wears three wristwatches: one for where he is now, one for where he will be next, and one that tells what time it is at his home.
Well now. Here’s an example of a little problem on which to try our FIDO computer.
Let’s wire up a magic wristwatch for Bucky the Folk Hero, one that will use a teeny FIDO on a chip (the coming thing), attached to three rows of numerical readouts (like those on pocket calculators). This application is not so absurd as you might think.
It is obviously quite simple in principle.
It will let us see some of the ways that the rock-bottom machine languages of computers are used.
Two pages of charts, diagrams, and explanations in English and in several computer languages follow this introduction in an attempt to illustrate Nelson’s principle.
¶ Costonis, John J. Space Adrift: Landmark Preservation and the Marketplace. Published for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, (1975).
8vo.; black and white photographs; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; few chips; library label on spine.
First edition of Costonis’s study, with a brief examination of Fuller’s “City of the Future” on page 172. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Buckminster Fuller A model for us all. John J. Costonis. With Fuller’s ownership signature beneath.
¶ Coulter, N. Arthur Jr., M.D. Synergetics: An Adventure in Human Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., (1976).
8vo.; grey cloth; dust-jacket; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition of Coulter’s espousal of Synergetics, the science of which he credits Fuller with founding:
The work on synergetics began August 6,1945, with Hiroshima…. The only way to prevent a nuclear holocaust would be to abolish war itself. The United Nations clearly could not do this, and conventional diplomacy has never worked in the past. And a limited world governmentthe logical step simply was not feasible…. Thirty years of study and research led to the development of a new sciencesynergetics. Techniques have been developed which enable individuals to turn on a new state of mind, characterized by a high degree of synergy, or working togetherness, of mental functions. There is an expanded awareness, an enhancement of rationality, and thinkfeel synergy. More important, a person operating in the synergic mode acts naturally not only to achieve his own goals, but also to promote the goals and interests of others affected by his actions. Techniques have also been developed which enable small groups to operate as synergic teams… . It is hoped that synergetics, in synergic alignment with other efforts, will contribute to the abolition of war. If enough people learn synergetics and use it, I believe that some day war will be as unthinkable as cannibalism and slavery.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller The founder of synergetics as a science. From another worker in this field. Warm regards Art Coulter. Fuller has noted at the beneath the inscription the pages on which he is referenced: See also pages 16, 259. On page 16 Coulter credits Fuller as “another early pioneer in Synergetics…whose concepts of anticipatory design for spaceship earth have inspired generations of students,” and summarized the role of synergy in Fuller’s philosophy. On page 259 he cites Fuller’s work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, which had appeared the year before this.
¶ Donally, Jim. Geodesic Domes and Dome Plans. Corvallis, OR: Experimental College, Oregon State University, 1974.
12mo.; photographic wrappers; stapled; library label on front cover.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed inside the front cover: Mr. Fuller Thank you very much for your integrated point of view. Jim Donally. Inside the rear cover Donally printed his name, Anchorage, Alaska address, and phone number.
Clark G. Reynolds reports that Fuller had designed the first geodesic dome when he was barely out of diapers: “while in kindergarten, he fashioned a tetrahedron-shaped device from dried peas and toothpicks that presaged his greatest architectural invention, the geodesic dome” (Reynolds, “R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller, Jr.,” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives Volume 1: 1981–1985, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998). By 1927 Fuller had designed his Dymaxion House. During World War II, while he was chief of mechanical engineering for the Board of Economic Warfare, the United States Army used the steel and fiberglass Dymaxion Deployment Unit he had designed. The design for the geodesic dome evolved from these earlier Dymaxion structures. Reynolds explains that “Fuller applied mathematics to his geometric use of triangles, tetrahedrons, and circles in his Dymaxion designs to develop the science of geodesics and synergetics, using tensional integrity (‘tensegrity’): mutually supporting parts in the three shapes for a domeshaped building whose lack of internal supports maximized space and whose appearance was new and aesthetically pleasing.” Another critic writes,
The geodesic dome is a clear expression of Fuller’s “more with less” criterion. A geodesic dome is a covered hemisphere composed of interlocking tetrahedrons made from standardized, mass-produced parts. The architectural forerunners of the geodesic dome were the crystal palaces and cast- iron buildings of the 19th century. The geodesic dome is a very flexible and versatile structure because its strength is derived from its tensile design rather than from its mass. Because he viewed shelter as a form of environmental management, Fuller wanted to develop the geodesic dome to the point where it could cover entire cities and exert complete climate control over them. To illustrate this idea, in 1950, Fuller presented a hypothetical plan to build a geodesic dome with a two-mile diameter over the midsection of Manhattan. (IDAA)
After Fuller built the first Geodesic domefifty feet in diameter at Black Mountain College, significant commissions followed in the ‘50s and ‘60s from Ford Motor Company in 1953, the Marine Corps in 1954, the Air Force in 1955, the U.S. Navy in 1956, to name a few of the most prominent. (According to a member of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the Marine Corps considered the geodesic dome to be “the first basic improvement in mobile military shelter in 2,500 years.”) Other notable examples were built at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and the 1967 Montreal Expo. Fuller obtained the patent on the dome in 1954. He enjoyed a beneficial affiliation with Southern Illinois University, lectured worldwide (including a year teaching poetry at Harvard) and was a special consultant to NASA.
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. DYNAPOLIS: The City OF the Future. Lecture at the Oslo Arkitektforening, March 3, 1960. Document R-GA 185. Athens: Doxiadis Associates, 1960.
8vo.; wrappers, stapled; taped spine.
First edition of this illustrated lecture on “The City of the Future” that is, a “dynamic city”including chapters on “Problems of Our Cities,” “From the City of the Past to the City of the Future,” “Dynapolis and its Principles,” and individual chapters on the size, form, structure, and scale of Dynapolis. From 1958-on Doxiadis was a regular on the university circuit, invited to the University of Chicago, the University of Dublin, Harvard, New York University, Oxford, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Georgia Tech, and other institutions.
“Dynapolis” is just one of many words coined and concepts developed by Constantines A. Doxiadis (1913–1975), the Greek dynamo of architecture, city planning, and future planning who worked his way into the public eye via a United Nations appointment in 1948 as Chairman of the UN working group on housing policies. Described by Time magazine as “the world’s best-known planner” and self-described as “basically a city builder…famous too as architect, teacher, philosopher, author and businessman,” he got his start in Greece as an architect in with a knack for self-promotion, ultimately ascending to Greek Minister for Postwar Reconstruction, a high-profile post that lead to his involvement in the U.N. project. His influence increased exponentially after the founding of his own engineering firm in 1951, Doxiadis Associates, an international planning, architecture and civil engineering practice and underwriter of many of his publications.
Doxiadis’s most lasting ideal is found in his exploration of “ekistics,” or, the science of human settlements. (“Ekistics” derives from the Greek word for “home.”) With a firm belief that a union of interdisciplinary thinkers encompassing the fields of engineering, urban planning, and architecture; sociology, psychology, and philosophy; education, industry, and politicscould solve the most pressing problems facing society, Doxiadis solicited donations from individuals and foundations to fund his journal, Ekistics, and Delos Symposia, a sort of think tank held summers from 1963–72. Thinkers from all over the globe and in various disciplines gathered to formulate solutions to the problems of human settlements, publishing their thoughts on those issues in Ekistics.
Alden Hatch writes that “[s]ome of Bucky’s most inspiring experiences during the 1960s were the annual Doxiadis cruises,” which he describes as “floating symposia for men and women of international fame and highly intelligent, farsighted people of goodwill.”
They all boarded a ship at Piraeus, the port of Athens, and sailed around the Aegean Sea visiting one or more of the historic Grecian islands every day. Aboard the ship there would be morning and evening lectures by different eminent men and women, followed by group discussions of how this or that world problem could best be solved or, at least, mitigated. It was Doxiadis’s idea that the ambient atmosphere of glorious ancient Greece would inspire creative thought and intellectual harmony. And it did. (Hatch, pp. 233–34)
Fuller; who attended every one of Doxiadias’s Symposia, sometimes brought his family, with whom he would then travel to Bear Island. Allegra notes that it was on these cruises that Bucky “met and became close and dear friends with Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Marshall McLuhan, Lord Llewelyn-Davies, Sir Robert Matthew, British economist Barbara Ward…, Jonas Salk and many more.
I think about 20 such important thinkers were asked each time but Bucky was the only who was asked to attend all of them. There were eleven, perhaps, twelve, of these symposium and Bucky was a key part of all of these from 1963 to 1975, or 1976. They were both very influential on him and he was very influential on the group. I think it was through these meetings that his ideas really gained international recognition. He also became International President of the World Society of Ekistics as a result of all this. I think he served in that capacity in 1975,1976. {Allegra Fuller Snyder email to Glenn Horowitz, October 2003)
In addition, Fuller spoke regularly throughout the 1960s at Doxiadis’s Athens Center of Ekistics (ACE) and the Athens Technological Organization (ATO).
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. Ekistics, Regional Science and Urban Geography. A comparative study based on a paper presented to the Second European Congress Regional Science Association Zurich Switzerland September 3–6, 1962. Document R-GA 307. Athens: Doxiadis Associates, 1962.
8vo.; wrappers, stapled; taped spine.
First edition of this early articulation of the goals that would become the focus of Doxi- adis’s career. Divided into six sections: introduction, contents and goals, methodology, achievements, the future, and the tasks ahead.
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. Ekistics: New Problems and New Solutions in Human Settlements. Article published in the Spanish magazine Revista de Occidente. Document R-GA 304. Athens: Doxiadis Associates, 1963.
8vo.; wrappers, stapled; taped spine.
First edition, first separate printing of an article published in Revista de Occidente. Divided into three sections: In the Past; New Problems (New Forces Objective Problems; Defective ConfrontationSubjective Problems; An Overall Human Problem; The Ekistic Problem); and New Solutions (Toward a Science of Ekistics; The Scope of Ekistics).
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. Ecumenopolis: Towards a Universal Settlement. Study based on several lectures given by Dr. Doxiadis to various universities, organizations and professional societies. Document R-GA 305. Athens: Doxiadis Associates, 1963.
8vo.; wrappers, stapled; taped spine.
First edition. Divided into chapters exploring the following lecture topics: “Where Are We Going?”; “Towards a Universal Settlement”; “Life and Death of Our Settlements”; “The Changing Nature of Our Settlements”; “The Changing Structure of Our Settlements”; “Outline of Ecumenopolis”; “Ecumenopolis in Practice”; “The Road to Ecumenopolis”; and “Call to Arms.”
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. Between Dystopia and Utopia. Hartford, CT: The Trinity College Press, (1966).
8vo.; 30 illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; rear panel rubbed; light edgewear; round sticker on spine.
First edition of these lectures delivered by Doxiadis at Trinity College March 7-11,1966, including “Towards Dystopia,” “Escape to Utopia,” and “Need of Entopia,” along with a foreword, introduction, epilogue, notes, and glossary. Doxiadis explains that “Entopia” is derived from the Greek words “in place.” A presentation copy, inscribed on the dedication page: to Bucky Fuller with many wishes for a happy life in a human settlement. Dinos. Beginning Delos IV. With a hand-drawn card presenting a chart of “man in the measure,” with Doxiadis’s note: Thank you for your congratulations and tvishes for the Aspen Award and thank you for your friendship. Dinos. And now we have many things to do . ..
¶ Doxiadis, C. ERISTICS. An introduction to the science of human settlements. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
4to.; illustrated; cloth; few minor abrasions; dust-jacket; edgeworn, with several chips.
First edition. At one moment in Ekistics, Doxiadis calls attention to the value of one of Fuller’s theories; this was years before Fuller assumed a leadership role in the Ekistics movement: “Following the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, we can also use the measurement of weight of construction per unit of space in an attempt to understand some of the real issues related to construction and to the necessity of a revolutionary approach to problems of mass construction for the great numbers of people who suffer from a lack of proper settlements” (p. 116).
¶ Doxiadis, C. EKISTICS. An introduction to the science of human settlements. London: Hutchinson, (1968).
4to.; illustrated; cloth; printed clear plastic dust-jacket, extremities chipped.
First English edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To Bucky Fuller for what he has done for the human mind (helping to open) for what he has done for the human senses and body (his shells) for his friendship. Dinos. July 68. With a typed letter carbon from Fuller’s secretary acknowledging receipt of this volume in his absence.
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. The Two-Headed Eagle. From the past to the future of human settlements. (Athens: Lycabettus Press, 1972.)
8vo.; black and white and color illustrations; wrappers; perfect bound.
First edition; expanded from a lecture he gave at the annual convention of American Association for the Advancement of Science, and addressed to “those who deal with the many sciences out of which we have to build ekistics, the science of human settlements” (p. 1).
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. Anthropopolis: City for Human Development. A symposium with Rene Dubos, Erik H. Erikson, Dennis Gabor, Reginald S. Louire, Margaret Mead, C.H. Waddington, Thomas A. Doxiadis and Spyros A. Doxiadis. (Athens: Athens Publishing Center, 1974.)
8vo.; red wrappers; perfect bound; edges scuffed; library label on spine; spine creased.
First edition. Collects the inter-curricular papers presented by some of the leading thinkers of the 1960s and 70s. This is the first of four “red” books Doxiadis wrote or compiled in an attempt to “try to help the understanding of what will happen to our human settlements and what we can do to save them” (Building Entopia, p. ix). Copies of the third and fourth books (Building Entopia and Action for Human Settlements) follow.
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. BUILDING ENTOPIA. (Athens: Athens Publishing Center, 1975.) 8vo.; red wrappers; perfect bound; edges scuffed; library label on spine.
First edition of Doxiadis’s treatment of the question of “how, in order to avoid disasters, we can turn Ecumenopolis, the Inevitable City of the Future (second book) in to Anthro- popolis, the Humane City that we need for Human Development (first book).” He continues, in his preface: “This book is called Building Entopia because it deals with the general ideas about future developments that we need. It deals with the way we can really build Entopia, the city of dreams that can come true, and not remain unrealistic” (p. ix).
¶ Doxiadis, C.A. ACTION FOR Human Settlements. (Athens: Athens Publishing Center, 1976.)
8vo.; red wrappers; perfect bound; edges scuffed; crease to cover; library label on spine.
First edition of the final red book, “dedicated to the way in which we can move from talking and writing about ideas, dreams and theories towards action” (Building Entopia, p. ix). In the preface, Doxiadis states that its goal is “not to save all human settlements, but to help start the process on a global basis, or at least to help any continent, country, region, or human settlement that has the initiative and courage to begin.” He details the evolution of these ideas:
The concept…was born when the United Nations decided to organize the first International Conference on Human Settlements in 1976 in Vancouver. A first draft was presented to the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study Workshop in May 1974 and to the eleventh Delos Symposium of the World Society for Ekistics. In this way the ideas for the radical changes we need were exposed to two groups of experts, the first group representing several institutions not connected with the science of ekistics, and the second group consisting of experts from many types of nations and professions connected with the idea of the need for a scientific approach to face the problems of human settlements …
Entertaining feedback from both audiences, Doxiadis states, did not change his views, but helped them to “mature.” Now ready to present them in their final form, he concludes, “Action on a global scale is needed because no individual country behaves in the proper way. Anything that can initiate such action will be helpful, no matter if the scale be limited. Action in the right direction helps both the people of the human settlement with which it is directly concerned and many others as well, since it becomes an example from which everyone can learn. Thus action develops the system more and more for the benefit of every in habitant of our globe” (p. vii).
INTRODUCING JOE AND JOSEPHINE
¶ Dreyfuss, Henry. The MEASURE OF Man. Human factors in design. New York: Whitney Library of Design, (1960).
8vo.; several inserts, described below; photographically illustrated paper-covered folder; rubbed; edge- worn; few chips; library label on spine.
First edition of this assemblage of research data useful to engineers, “developed in the course of designing the interiors of airplanes and lines, plumbing fixtures, machine tools, farm and industrial equipment, telephones, missile systems, and the interiors of combat vehicles and naval vessels.” Compiled by the firm of Henry Dreyfuss, which had begun in the late ‘20s by the theater designer turned industrial design pioneer who would be known as one of the “big three” of the profession; his colleagues were Norman Bel Geddes and Walter Dorwin Teague. Dreyfuss (1904-1972), whose name is now synonymous with the streamlined look of the ’30s, designed dozens of iconic landmarks and consumer products, including the Hoover vacuum, the John Deere Tractor, the Big Ben clock, and the streamlined New York Central locomotive, to name a few.
With a half-leaf loosely inserted, bearing an autograph note by Fuller: to be put with my books, included in biography of Design Decade. R.B.F.
The anthropometric data contained in these diagrams and charts includes thirteen diagrams of people of various sizes in various positions, with distances and angles of sight and movement indicated; three pages with charts and figures relating to issues of human strength, body clearance, climbing data, ingress and egress, basic display data, and basic control data; a stapled booklet with a foreword, general information, and keys to manual controls, pedals, visual displays, auditory signals, sensory signals, anthropometric conformity, safety, illumination, environment, maintenance, books, pamphlets, papers, and journals. Finally, the book contains two folded posters, 2x6 feet each, one male and one female: Joe and Josephine. Their birth is explained by the text on the rear flap:
The firm applies a five-point yardstick to the products it designs. The first of these is convenience of use, including utility and safety, and the second is ease of maintenance. Both of these factors relate directly to people and the other three, cost, sales, and appearance, relate indirectly. It was because of this interest in people that the Dreyfuss office began, about 25 years ago, to develop the figures of Joe and Josephine which now provide all the essential measurements of the male and female figure of the genus homo sapiens… .
¶ Dreyfuss, Henry. SYMBOL SOURCEBOOK. An authoritative guide to international graphic symbols. New York: McGraw-Hill, (1972).
4to.; cloth; dust-jacket; spine sunned and bumped; small closed tear to cover; paper clip indentation; library label on spine.
First edition of the culmination of over twenty years of research into the use of symbols by individuals and corporations worldwide. With it, Dreyfuss hoped to provide a thorough, though not comprehensive, archive of standard symbols with which to facilitate universal communication. Fuller, whose own work was based on the evolving need for greater exchange of information among cultures, was an early advocate. His foreword provided an imprimateur of intellectual and pedagogical importance. But this was just a beginning: Dreyfuss included “A Plea for More Symbols” on the opening page, and inscribed this book to Fuller with an indication that more would follow. Tragically, in the year of publication Dreyfuss and his wife, who was terminally ill with cancer, successfully carried out a joint suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: Bucky In great appreciation for getting this volume off to a good start. Thank you. Henry Drey fuss 1972.
¶ Dunham, Katherine. ISLAND POSSESSED. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1969.
8vo.; blue cloth; dust-jacket; extremities gently bumped.
First edition of Dunham’s memoir of Haiti. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Ann and Bucky with loveKatherine Dunham E. St. Louis 1969. With Dunham’s bookplate; a pamphlet on Dunham loosely inserted; and a “Happy New Year” insert from Southern Illinois University.
Bucky met the dancer Katherine Dunham through David Pratt, the brother of her husband. The Pratts were early Chicago colleagues, along with the Walleys, and later joined Fuller on the Design Faculty at SIU. It is Dunham who called Fuller’s attention to the terrible social and environmental problems confronting East Saint Louis, and together they executed the design stages of the “Old Man River” project, based on the idea of an um- brellaed town.
¶ (Economics) Kelso, Louis O. and Mortimer J. Adler. The New CAPITALISTS. APro- posal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings. New York: Random House, (1961).
8vo.; red cloth; dust-jacket; edgeworn; spine sunned.
First edition, second printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky Fuller, with warm regards, Louis O. Kelso San Francisco July, 1967. With Kelso’s business card clipped to the half-title.
¶ (Economics) Rockefeller, David. CREATIVE MANAGEMENT IN Banking. New York: McGraw-Hill, (1964).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky Fuller. With deep admiration and warm regards. David Rockefeller, New York, Dec. 4, 1964.
It seems likely that Fuller first met economist David Rockefeller in 1964 in Russia, at the Leningrad “Dartmouth Conference” at which he also met Norman Cousins. All were part of a group of American intellectual emissaries sent to meet with scientists. (For further detail, see item #148.) Rockefeller and his wife, who shared the Rockefeller enclave in Maine near the Fullers, visited Bear Island more than once. In later years their daughter Neva became one of Fuller’s proteges, a founding board member of the Design Science Institutededicated to Fuller’s work and a board member of World Game Institute.
¶ (Economics) Theobald, Robert. Free Men and Free Markets. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., (1963).
8vo.; orange cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed and edgeworn.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller, In hope that we can learn to use our technology to promote human dignity Robert Theobald.
¶ (Education) Hardison, O.B. Jr. Toward Freedom and Dignity. The Humanities and the Idea of Humanity. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, (1972).
8vo.; blue half cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed and edgeworn; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky from an admiring fellow passenger on space-ship earth. O.B. Hardison, Jr. March 23, 1973. Fuller’s friendship with Hardison dates to late 1940s or early 1950s North Carolina, where Fuller taught at the State College from 1949-55. (They awarded him his first Honorary Doctorate in 1954.) One of Fuller’s closest friends on the Design faculty was James Fitzgibbon, with whom he founded the design firm Synergetics, Inc. in Raleigh in 1954. Fitzgibbon’s sister Marifrancis was married to Hardison, with whom Fuller also became quite close.
Hardison references Fuller in his introduction, in discussing what life will be like in the year 2000: “Whether it is the Malthusian cataclysm forecast by writers like Paul Ehrlich and Jay W. Forrester or the geodesic Utopia of technocratic optimists like Buckminster Fuller, its physical conditions will be different and its mode of consciousness will be different” (xiii).
¶ (Einstein, Albert) Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. ALBERT Einstein: PHILOSOPHER- SciENTlST. The Library of Living Philosophers Volume VII. La Salle, IL and London: Open Court and Cambridge University Press, (1970).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly soiled; extremities worn.
Third edition. A dual presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller I With all best wishes and great admiration, sincerely, Blanche Carey, Publisher of Open Court, 30 March 1971. Signed by Fuller beneath, with his additional note: See next page, indicating the half-title, on which the editor has inscribed the book: To Dr. Buckminster Fuller, esteemed colleague and friend, with cordial good wishes from Paul A. Schlipp. S.I.U. Carbondale, III. April 2, 1971.
Fuller’s life and work was greatly influenced by Einstein; his first book, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), included a discussion of Einstein’s impact on daily living. He later wrote of him as a source of inspiration:
In his daring concept of universal evolution as constant action, as put forth and written into (unwittingly) poetry by Einstein, we have then the greatest conceptioning and greatest communication by a human being to other human beings not only in the 20th century but possibly in any other of the centuries. Therefore I see that Einstein is certainly the great artist of the 20th Century. (Cosmography)
THE DEDICATION COPY I EXTENSIVELY ANNOTATED BY FULLER
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. Nine Chains TO THE Moon. Philadelphia… : Lippincott,
(1938).
8vo.; hinges tender; iridescent copper cloth; lightly rubbed; spine darkened; extremities lightly frayed. First edition of Fuller’s first book, written with Robert Marks; it was virtually neglected upon publication, but the 1963 reissue was substantially more popular. The dedication copy, inscribed on the front endpaper by Fuller to his wife Anne and two daughters: …this is our copy, yours, Allegra’s, Xandra’s and mine. May God grant that it help to make the world ever safer for love. BF Aug 5th 1938 105 E 88 N.Y.C. The printed dedication reads “To Alexandra and Allegra ‘Your strange divinity still kept’.” Fuller’s note at the foot of the page explains, from poem “To a Child” by Christopher Morley 1922. Fuller annotated this copy with notes on the removal of text (presumably with a later edition in mind); also with many related clippings loosely inserted, a four-page ad for the book affixed to the rear pastedown, and a review affixed to the half-title.
In 1917 Fuller married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, a prominent architect who introduced Fuller to the field. Their first daughter, Alexandra, born in 1918, died of a childhood illness at the age of four. Allegra was born in 1927, shortly before Fuller decided to retreat from work to ponder the issues that would come to define his designs. When he emerged from his self-contained think tank after two years, he had begun to formulate some of the concepts that would make his career.
The history of this book dates to Fuller’s 1928 4D Timelock (for Fourth Dimension) which he sent to Chris Morley. The two first met six years later, when Fuller unveiled his second Dymaxion car in New York, and became fast friends, developing their ideas through countless conversations, particularly through discussions of the practical applications of Einstein’s theories. Morley persuaded Lippincott, his own publishers, to take on Nine Chains to the Moon, which he blurbed before publication and reviewed after.
Fuller drew the title of this book from his realization that if all humans lined up end-to- end, they could reach from the Earth to the moon and back nine times. He wrote, “If it is not so far to the moon, then it is not so far to the limits of the universewhatever; whenever; or wherever they may be.” In the first chapter; “Tentative Cosmic Inventory,” he entered “everything humanity knew at the timethe limits of what science had been able to find,” which led him to a consideration of the work of Albert Einstein. “You see,” he reflects, “I was convinced that Einstein’s relativity, deriving from the measurements of the speed of light would catalyze a chain reaction ultimately altering altogether the patterning of man’s everyday world.” His next chapter includes his discussion of “how a man like that came to formulate his equation. A man with philosophy like that, who worked in the Swiss patent office for a number of years…” His biographical evaluation of Einstein’s theory lead to a third chapter, “E=MC2=Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower,” envisioning a world in which Einstein’s theory were proven correct.
An editor at Lippincott, concerned by Fuller’s lack of name recognition within the field of Relativity, sent the typescript to Einstein himself, then in Princeton. Fuller recounts their meeting: “He said he had read my typescript and he approved of my explanation of how he had arrived at his conclusions and was going to notify my publishers to that effect. ‘But,’ he then said, ‘young man, this chapter on Mrs. Murphyyou amaze me. I cannot myself conceive of anything I have done ever having the slightest practical application’ ” (Fuller, 1980, pp. 68–69).
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “ENVIRONMENT Valving.” In Proceedings Of Short Course For Architects In Planning For Heating And Air Conditioning In Small Buildings, 130. (Urbana, IL: Dept, of Mechanical Engineering, Dept, of Architecture, Univ, of Ill. Division of Univ. Extension 1952.)
8vo.; several black and white illustrations; mimeographed; printed wrappers; taped spine; lightly worn and sunned; library label on spine.
First edition; prints transcripts of conference lectures, nearly all except Fuller’s. The following explanatory note appears on page 130, where his lecture should be: “Mr. Fuller presented the banquet address which he titled above [Environment Valving]. Unfortunately, the recording equipment did not fully record his excellent address which consisted of a multitude of original and often startling remarks, comments, and slides pertaining to his research in three dimensional structure. In the event that this paper becomes available in the near future, it will be forwarded as an addenda to the proceeding” (p. 130). With Fuller’s pencil notation on the cover: RBF Page 130.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization. New York: Simon and Schuster, (1962).
8vo.; full black morocco.
First edition of Fuller’s first book of poetry, in which he sought to extend his philosophic ideas about humanity’s proper relationship to the natural environment. In it, he substituted the poetic metaphor for the reasoned analysis of his carefully crafted prose arguments. In one such extended metaphor, Fuller conceived the technological fruits of our efforts to better humankind as extensions of the human body: for instance, tools as the extension of arms and hands, automobiles and highways as the extension of legs and feet. One of Fuller’s retained copies, signed by him, with his note: This 1962 edition failed to note that the text was completed in 1940. The next printing will include that fact.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “Vision 65: Summary Lecture: Utopia or Oblivion.” In Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, 11 (1965), 58–63.
4to.; black and white photographs and illustrations; silver wrappers; perfect bound; spine unglued; round sticker on spine.
This eleventh issue of Perspecta includes Fuller’s lecture, as well as contributions by Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, and over a dozen leaders in the fields of architecture, planning, and design.
In “Utopia or Oblivion,” Fuller posits the existence of “hundreds of millions of other planets in the universe with men living on them,” and introduces his metaphor of the “spaceship earth.”
Human beings often say, “I wonder what it would be like to be on a spaceship. ” The answer is, “What does it feel like?you are and always have been on a very small spaceship, eight thousand miles in diameter.” The nearest star Sun is ninety-two million miles away and the next brightest Rigil Kentaurus is not even there. You are very much alone in your spaceship. And this spaceship is designed so superbly, all its passengers so skillfully provided for; that they have been oh board playing the game of self-reproduction for two million years without even realizing that they are on board a spaceship.
In his prefatory note for the first number of Perspecta, George Howe explained that that issue was “but a beginning. It proposes to establish the arguments that revolve around the axis of contemporary architecture on a broader turntable, encompassing the past as well as the present and extendable to the future. To all architects, teachers, students Perspecta offers a place on the merry-go-round.” In a note opening this eleventh issue, Peter de Bretteville and Arthur Golding write of their interest in “the evolving idea of a new relationship between art and society: the conviction that art is coming to play a more diffused and direct role in the environment and that the artist as hero is becoming less important.
There is a new concern with the whole synthetic and natural environment in terms of the interconnected processes that shape it and result from it. Another important direction is toward inclusive, both / and ways of thinking rather than categorical, either / or ways of thinking. Younger people, bound to the first generation of modern architects by a sense of potential and to the second by a sense of crisis, are separated from both by this feeling for complexity.
They conclude: “These themes are developed in several ways in Perspecta 11. Some of the articles were chosen to define issues, others as responses to a new understanding of the present.”
INSCRIBED BY NOGUCHI
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “Foreword,” in A Sculptor’s World, by Isamu Noguchi. New York: Harper &c Row, (1968).
4to.; 255 black and white and 1–3 color plates; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly soiled; few small closed tears.
First American edition, with a foreword by Fuller. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Bucky in the beginning [sic] and to the end. Isamu. Noguchi also acknowledges Fuller in his prefatory text: “Friendship honors me in Buckminster Fuller’s introduction where with characteristic generosity he again teaches me to be more than I am” [10].
Fuller met Noguchi, fresh from studying with Brancusi in Paris, in 1929 in New York, at Romany Marie’s (a favorite Greenwich Village haunt)see item #57. One critic writes that “ [i] t was Bucky’s talk of global problem solving, particularly the worldwide distribution of prefabricated shelter by air transport designed for citizens of the world . . . that Isamu responded to. . . . ‘We were both independent thinkers,’ said Bucky. ‘And the technology I talked about absolutely fascinated Isamu, particularly what I had to say about light.’ ” Noguchi later recalled: “Some time later I got an old laundry room on top of a building on Madison Avenue and 29th Street with windows all around. Under Bucky’s sway I painted the whole place silverso that one was almost blinded by the lack of shadows. There I made his portrait head in chrome-plated bronzealso form without shadow” (Fuller, 1980, pp. 62–63). Fuller recalled that “posing for him day after day gave us a chance to build up our friendship that went on and on from there” (ibid., pp. 64–65). At the time, Noguchi’s commissioned “heads,” as Fuller called them, commanded serious prices. Fuller writes, “I was continually bust, and he used to let me sleep in his studiousually on the floor” (ibid.). After the stock market crash, it was Fuller who provided the floor for Noguchi:
When the Depression set in seriously and most of the New York hotels were empty and looking for something to attract people, they’d ask me to come with my Dymaxion house to be on exhibit. They would give me a beautiful room or apartment to use as an exhibition room and Isamu and I would sleep on the floorno bedclothes or anything. They gave us a bathroom to go to, and we’d literally live on coffee and doughnuts every other day or so. (ibid.)
Noguchi recalled, ‘ “We would move in with our air mattresses and a drawing board and that was it. The less the better was his credo. His Shelter magazine was produced under such circumstances (1930-1932)” (ibid.). In 1932 Fuller named Noguchi’s well-known Miss Expanding Universe.
Noguchi’s narrative portrait of Fuller is among the more vivid preserved in published form:
Bucky was in a continuous state of dialectic creativity, giving talks in any situation before any kind of audience …He would talk to me as though to a throng; walking and talking everywhereover the Brooklyn Bridge, over innumerable cups of coffee. Bucky drank everythingtea, coffee, liquor with equal gusto and would often be in a state of wide-awake euphoria for three days straight. Drink did not seem to affect him otherwise.
He used to drink like a fish. He had become a God-possessed man, like a Messiah of ideas. He was a prophet of things to come. Bucky didn’t take care of himself, but he had amazing strength. He often went without sleep for several days, and he didn’t always eat either.
Bucky’s zest for life is part and parcel of his creativity. However, he has the capacity and resolution to come to grips in unknown hours and retreats of the mind to fathom new secrets from the universe. (ibid., pp. 62–63)
Given this description, it merits noting that Fuller gave up drinking and smoking for the rest of his life on July 12,1942the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Anne.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “How Little I Know.” In What I Have Learned. New York: Simon and Schuster, (1968), 71–150.
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; edgeworn; library label on spine.
First edition of this collection of twenty autobiographical essays that first ran in the “Saturday Review.” Includes pieces by Doxiadis, Ilya Ehrenburg, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alan Paton, and others.
Fuller’s copy, with his ownership signature on the front endpaper, and his ink box drawn around his printed name on the dust-jacket.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “The Phantom Captain”; “Dollarability”; “Technology and Education”; “Prime Design.” In Beyond Left & Right: Radical Thought For Our Times. Edited and with an introduction by Richard Kostelan- etz. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
8vo.; half-cloth; dust-jacket; library label on spine.
First edition of this anthology of essays by Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Bell, Doxiadis, Moshe Safdie, Leslie A. Fiedler, and others. The printed dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to its contributors, for thinking radically about a better future,” making this one of several potential dedication copies, inscribed by the editor on the half-title: Sept, 1968, For Bucky Fuller, The greatest mind alive, his thinking permeates this book, my intraduction, and much else. The dedication here is especially for you. In friendship and peace, Richard Kostelanetz.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “The Artist-Scientist-Inventor.” In The Arts And Man: A World View Of The Role And Functions Of The Arts In Society. (Paris: UNESCO, 1969), 91–102.
4to.; black and white and color plates; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; light edgewear; single tape repair. First edition. With additional contributions by d’Arcy Hayman, Herbert Read, Ka- maladevi Chattopadhyay, Pier Luigi Nervi, Basilio Uribe, Andre Maurois, William Melnitz, Grigory Kozintsev, and Yehudi Menuhin.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper by the book’s editor d’Arcy Hayman, who also contributed a chapter: To Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose extraordinary being (very close to God) has given such abundant inspiration direction, and courage to me and so many others, to act and to live for the betterment of man. Thank you, dear Bucky, for your own great contribution to this book and to this work of UNESCO. With admiration, appreciation and affection, d’Arcy Hayman August 1969. For remarks by Fuller on Hayman, see item #113.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. Planetary Planning. Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture. (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund), 1969.
8vo.; one fold-out chart; wrappers; light wear.
First edition. Prints a welcoming address by Indira Gandhi, an envoi by the President, Shri V.V. Giri, and the text of Fuller’s lecture, with his prefatory note which explains the structure of the volume. The first part contains the “probably live content of my presentation, made spontaneously without recourse to notes.” The second presents “the historical philosophic background of my spontaneous discourse.” Fuller also offers a brief history of the topic of his lecture:
Throughout half a century I have sought for the comprehensively rational coordinate system employed by nature. Thirty years ago I found the first clues. These multiplied over the year. Only recently have I been able to establish firmly the part played in it by Planck’s Constant. I am taking this occasion of honouring Nehru to formally present what is to me my greatest discovery. I do not discuss it exhaustively but identify precisely where and how it functions in the comprehensive scheme of what I call “Energetic-Synergetic Geometry.”
Gandhi’s introduction of Fuller, in which he acknowledges his personal qualities as well as his scientific and humanistic achievements, merits quoting at length:
…Mr. Fuller is described as an architect. He is that, because of his intense concern with living space. But he is something more than an architect because his obsession is with the architecture of the universe.
We all have heard of Mr. Fuller’s invention, the geodesic dome, which is now seen all over the world. It is a brilliant use of space and material. Then there are the world map and other items. But what is far more important is that Mr. Fuller has shown how to get the maximum from the minimum material by making the most intelligent use of the resources available on earth.
…He has known failure and he has shrugged it off. He has known material success and it has not meant much to him. Our ancient sages urged that we should be unruffled by joy or sorrow. Mr. Fuller proves that this is an invitation to more action and not a counsel of passivity. This outlook is the link between the lecturer of today and the person after whom the lecture is named…
Today Mr. Fuller is speaking of planetary planning. He is one of those who have spoken of a one- town worlda challenging way of describing the fact that new communications have made all nations neighbors
Indira Gandhi spoke these words over a decade after their first meeting, in 1958. Fuller had been invited to New Delhi to deliver three lectures, at which Indira was among the most attentive in the audience. At the conclusion of the third lecture she invited him home to meet her father, Prime Minister Nehru. Fuller later recounted, in his “Everything I Know” lectures:
Mr. Nehru came home from the Parliament to see me. I talked to Mrs. Gandhi all morning. I had my maps and we had them out on the floor of the parlor floor there. And then he finally came, and he came into the doorway and she introduced him to me… And I talked to him possibly something like…25 minutes.
In years after this Mrs. Gandhi said, “whenever you come to India, particularly New Delhi (where their house is) be sure to telephone right away and let us know you’re here.” And I have done so ever since…There was one meeting that we had with Nehru, at Lake Kashmir, a beautiful place in the Valley of Kashmir, and he had gone there to rest, and I had a number of things I had written with me… reprints of magazines and so forth. I said “I have with me a number of things that I have written, but I don’t believe you have time to read them…” He said, “I read every word of yours I can get a hold of…”
On a later visit to India Fuller called and was invited by Indira to the Prime Minster’s house immediately. Indira “came in very quickly and her eyes were in tears really, and she said ‘My father has just had a stroke.’ And, I was very moved that she wanted me to come, but it wasn’t as if I really knew her well enough.. .So, I said, trying to think of what you’d say to a lady who’s father had just had a stroke a great man. I said, ‘if your father were not to recover, or if he were even to die, would you try to carry on his political work.’ She said ‘Oh no. I would not think of doing so. I really have no aptitude …that’s not my world. I’m at my best to be my father’s companion, and to carry on in that kind of way, but as for taking any political initiative, I don’t have it in me at all.’ This was a very important thing to hear from heq under those circumstances. I don’t think the question had ever come up.”
After her father’s death Indira was asked to be the Prime Minister pro tem to hold together the Congress Party until the next election. “When I heard that she had done that,” Fuller wrote, “I thought about what I’d heard her say under those extraordinary conditions, that I was possibly the only person in the world who knew that she wasn’t going in there for any political ambition. She was going in absolutely for dedication to her father, and Mahatma Gandhi and their philosophy. So she went in as a housekeeper, and she has been in there that way every since… . Every time I go to see her she usually gives me …about an hour or so. And I sat with her as the Pakistani had their first air attack on India at that time. I’ve been at some very critical moments there. So she’d like to have me there, and she’d like me really to talk about other things.”
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “DESIGN SCIENCE: ENGINEERING, An ECONOMIC Success of All Humanity.” Zodiac. 19: Geometric Researches. Kiesler, Fuller, Neumann & Hecker, Tyng, McHale, Safdie, Kuhn. (1969) pp. 58–74, with 15 additional pages of black and white photographs and illustrations.
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; stiff wrappers with flaps; library label on spine. Includes a transcript of Fuller’s lecture from the 1967 World Congress at Tel Aviv.
¶ (Fuller, R. Buckminster) Theatre for St. Peters College, Oxford, England. In Current Projects of Fosters Associates. (1970).
4to.; two brochures; several magazines and clippings bound together; cardboard folder; library label, and identification on spine.
A collection of marketing materials, press clips, and other information arranged in a Fosters Associates folder on current projects, among them the Theatre for St. Peters College, Oxford, England, a geodesic shell designed in association with Fuller.
This was Fuller’s first architectural endeavor in England, though he had extensive interaction with the English architectural community beginning in the late ‘50s. His many visits there included lectures as well as student projects at the architectural schools.
In 1968 Fuller received the Gold Medal from Queen Elizabeth upon the recommendation of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Norman Foster was one of a number of young English architects with whom Fuller developed a life long friendship.
Towards the end of Fuller’s life he worked closely with Foster in developing a design for a mass produced single family dwelling which included the preparation of a large model with Fuller’s American associate, John Warren.
This project is explained as follows:
The practice is associated with Professor Buckminster Fuller on this project, his first in the UK. It sets a number of precedents: Located underground, below the water table, in the College quadrangle, its structure has been likened to that of submarines. A geodesic form is being used to resist the pressures of earth, weather and surrounding buildings.
The project received its initial impetus as a memorial theatre to the playwright Samuel Beckett; Buckminster Fuller’s involvement has extended the scope of the project to provide a multi-purpose space adaptable for a wide range of theatre configurations and capable of interpretation as a highly serviced teaching / exhibition space.
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “Man’s Changing Role in the Universe.” In Liberations: New Essays On The Humanities In Revolution. Edited by Ihad Hassan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, (1971).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed.
First edition. In addition to Fuller’s contribution, this includes essays by John Cage, Daniel Stern, Michael Wolff, Hayden White, Louis Mink, Frank Kermode, David Daiches, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Poirier, Leslie A. Fiedler, and Ihab Hassan.
1111 Fuller, R. Buckminster. “PLANETARY PLANNING.” In Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lectures 1967–1972. New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1973, [40]-120.
8vo.; fold-out chart; wrappers; dust-jacket; wear to extremities; library label on cover.
Second edition of this anthology which also prints talks by P.M.S. Blackett (“Science and World Technology in an Unequal World”), S. Chandrasekhar (“Astronomy in Science and in Human Culture”), Jan Tinbergen (“Some Thoughts on Mature Socialism”), Hermann Goetz (“The World Perspective of Indian Art”), and Noam Chomsky (“Science and Ideology”).
INSPIRED BY FULLER AND INSCRIBED TO HIM
¶ (Fuller, R. Buckminster) Brand,Stewart, ed. The Updated Last Whole Earth CATALOGUE. Access to tools. Edited by Stewart Brand. All listings accurate as of May 1974. N.P.: October 1974.
4to.; printed on newsprint; pages evenly browned; wrappers; edgeworn; library label on spine.
Together with:
(Fuller, R. Buckminster) Whole Earth Epilog. Access to tools. Edited by Stewart Brand. N.P.: September 1974.
4to.; printed on newsprint; pages evenly browned; wrappers; edgeworn; one small closed tear and chip; library label on spine.
First edition, fifteenth printing of this landmark catalogue of references and resources which was “initiated” by Fuller’s “insights” (editor’s prefatory tribute). The dedication copy, inscribed on page 3, where the editor’s tribute to Fuller begins: Thank you, sir! Stewart Brand. Though there is no official dedication page, Brand writes on page three that “[t]he insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog,” and includes a short review of his published works:
Among [Fuller’s] his books listed here, Utopia or Oblivion is now probably the most direct introduction. It’s a collection of his talks and papers from 1864 to 1967, at a bargain price. An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is his most recent, and succinct, statement. Nine Chains to the Moon is early, and openly metaphysical. The Untitled Epic of Industrialization is lyrical and strong. Ideas and Integrities is his most autobiographical, and perhaps the most self-contained of his books. No More Secondhand God is the most generalized, leading into the geometry of thought.
Brand goes on to address the concerns of some of Fuller’s audiences:
People who beef about Fuller mainly complain about his repetitionthe same ideas again and again, it’s embarrassing, also illuminating, because the same notions take on different contexts. Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich nonlinear endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.
Some are put off by his language, which makes demands on your head like suddenly discovering an extra engine in your carif you don’t let it drive you faster, it’ll drag you. Fuller won’t wait. He spent two years silent after illusory language got him in trouble, and he returned to human communication with a redesigned instrument.
Together with a first edition of this “epilogue,” introduced by Brand: “Where the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated the Whole Earth Catalogue, Gregory Bateson’s insights
lurk behind most of what’s going on in this Epilog. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first leaf by the editor: With gratitude Stewart Brand 18 Jan 75.
As of 1996,1.2 millions copies of the Whole Earth Catalogue and its progeny had been sold, and new volumes were still being issued. J. Baldwin writes,
A policy of reporting only positive results and recommendations engendered the positive attitude necessary for spirited exploratory effort. A policy of rejecting all advertising, political and religious ranting, sinner-smiting, and proselytizing on any subject made the information credible and trustworthy. Reader feedback corrected errors, kept things honest, and introduced innovation…. The Whole Earth publications continue to fulfill the task of gathering, and, especially, winnowing information that Bucky saw as one of our most important duties as humans. (Baldwin, p. 217)
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. “PREFACE.” In Embrace Me Universe and More. Drawings and Poems by d’Arcy Hayman. (Paris: Jean Taillande, 1979.)
8vo.; illustrated; printed wrappers.
First edition of this collection, with a preface by Fuller. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank page: To Bucky, The shining, loving force in the universe of our time …I am eternally grateful to you for the inspiration you have brought to me, and to the human family. You are a blessed man, you have seen and you can share the way. With love, d’Arcy.
In his introductory note, composed for this publication at the end of the 1970s, Fuller praises the work achieved by UNESCO, and by Hayman as twenty-year head of their Arts Section, in which capacity “she has influenced and inspired artists around the worldnot only by the strength of her own work but by her loving appreciation of the work of others.” He continues, “d’Arcy Hayman lives through the vision of an artist; everything she does is touched with her artist’s brush. All of her work will live on to be included with the best work of this extraordinary 20th century.” The opening paragraph of that introduction merits quoting in full:
The latest census shows four billion, one hundred million humans to be present on our planet. The four billion dream yearningly of a united, peaceful, lovingly cooperative world. One hundred million seem preoccupied in multiplying the dismay of the four billion, by more arms, more political confrontation, more depreciation of our buying power and savings, more bombing of school buses, and more of the most ruthless, inhumane inter-power structure puppet state guerilla warfaring that history has ever known.
ANNOTATED BY FULLER
¶ Fuller, R. Buckminster. R. BUCKMINSTER Fuller: An AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MONOLOGUE / Scenario. Documented and edited by Robert Snyder. New York: St. Martin’s Press, (1980).
8vo.; black and white photographs; top edge foxed; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; photographic dust-jacket.
First edition of Fuller’s “autobiography,” edited by his son-in-law, Allegra’s husband, Academy Award winning documentarian Robert Snyder. One of Fuller’s own copies, inscribed to him by Snyder on the front endpaper: For Bucky with ever-ever love Bob. Substantially annotated by Fuller on the first 35 pages, with his captions to photographs and his removal of the “auto” in “autobiography” wherever it appears, suggesting the high level of Snyder’s compositional involvement. Snyder organized Fuller’s ideas and recollections into categories, occasionally bridging explanatory gaps with his own passages, indicated by italics. Further, he interviewed several important influencessuch as Noguchi and added these separate “monologues” where appropriate.
¶ (FuturePlanning) Ferguson, Marilyn. The AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY. Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., (1980).
8vo.; black half cloth; dust-jacket; slightly rubbed; library label on spine.
First edition of this explanation of “how an underground network is working to create a different kind of society based on a vastly enlarged concept of human potential” (dust- jacket). A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: For Buckminster Fuller, with admiration, best wishesand thanks for permission to quote “No More Secondhand God” Marilyn Ferguson March 4, 1980. With the publisher’s promotional flier loosely inserted. Fuller is referenced, quoted, or discussed on six pages.
¶ (Future Planning) Gabor, Dennis. INVENTING THE Future. London: Seeker & Warburg, (1963).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; closed tear along upper joint.
First edition; dedicated to Aldous Huxley. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper.
¶ Halprin, Lawrence. The RSVP CYCLES: CREATIVE PROCESSES IN THE Human Environment. New York: George Braziller, (1969).
Oblong 8vo.; ownership signatures on the front endpapers; unidentified hand-drawn floor plan loosely inserted; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket.
First edition.
Fuller’s annotated reading COPY
¶ Hecht, Selig. EXPLAINING THE Atom. New York: The Viking Press, 1947.
8vo.; hinges tender; cloth; spine sunned; extremities frayed; round sticker on spine.
First edition, second pre-publication printing. Fuller’s reading copy, with his notes on the front endpapers and in the margins of several pages, and his signature, dated May 31, 1947, on the front endpaper. With a brief obituary note taped on the title page: “Selig Hecht, 55, professor of biophysics, Columbia University, and well-known authority in the field of vision, died September 18, 1947 of a coronary thrombosis at his home in New York City.”
¶ Hemmings, Fred. Surfing. Hawaii’s Gift to the World of Sports. (Tokyo: Zokeisha Publications Ltd., 1977).
8vo.; color plates; printed on card stock; colorfully printed cloth concealing plastic spiral binding; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: To Dr. and Mrs. Fuller Warmest Aloha from Hawaii Fred Hemmings.
Hemmings (1946– ) was an early proponent of surfing as a sport, and eventually became a world champion. Born in Hawaii, he surfed Waikiki and Hawaii’s famous north shore in the golden of age of long board surfing during the late 1950s and ‘60s. Riding a big gun board, he won the 1968 World Surf Contest. In the 1970s he helped establish the professional surf circuit, founding and running the most famous of all events, the Pipeline Masters, during its first seven years.
¶ (History) Dodd, William E. Jr., and Martha Dodd, eds. AMBASSADOR Dodd’s Diary 1933-1938. With an introduction by Charles A. Beard. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1941).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed; edgeworn; spine faded and soiled; library label on spine.
First edition, third printing of “the diary of a man who watched Europe go to war, and knew what he was watching,” documenting Dodd’s Berlin perspective on the men controlling world affairs from 1933 to 1937. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Buckminster Fuller with warmest greetings from Martha Dodd & Alfred Stern. Jan 31–42 N.Y.C.
Franklin D. Roosevelt plucked William Dodd, “widely recognized, by those competent to pass upon such matters, as one of America’s ablest historians, a writer and teacher of distinction,” from the faculty at the University of Chicago where he was a history professor, to occupy the post of Ambassador to Germany, stationed in Berlin. With a lengthy list of books on American history to his credit, especially on the American South, Dodd was peculiarly suited to the post. With a doctorate from the University of Leipzig and at least one substantial publication in German, he was fairly well-versed in the life, history, and character of that country. Charles Beard, in his foreword to these diaries, identifies Dodd’s primary duty as Ambassador: “to strengthen and rally the moderate elements in German society then bewildered, no doubt, but not yet solidified and gleich-geschaltet under the iron regime of Chancellor Hitler and his party.” Beard classified this goal as possibly “hopeless from the beginning,” noting that “knowledge of history, or anything else, does not permit an unequivocal verdict on this problem in politics and morals” (p. xiii). He does, however, catalogue Dodd’s remarkable achievements without qualification:
He saw more clearly than most of his colleagues, American and foreign, in the diplomatic corps, the hard draft of things toward the tragedy of the coming years. He repeatedly predicted, despite the epithets “alarmist” and “sensationalist” applied to him by unfriendly critics, the ruthless course which Germany, Italy, and Japan were destined to take, if unchecked by the concerted action of their neighbors. He divined the frightful crash bound to come from the policy of appeasement, intrigue, and vacillation, and he fought relentlessly, as far as he was able, to stop it. (p. xiv)
In the throes of these endeavors, Dodd maintained this diaryin Beard’s words “a dossier of evidence bearing on policies, methods, and labors…covering affairs from the beginning to the end of his mission.” Beard adds, “But it is more than that”:
Unlike many writers who have dealt with this historic crisis, Mr. Dodd was behind the scenes at Berlin, the strategic center of the National Socialist movement. He knew personally the leaders in that upheaval, spoke with them, and had an opportunity to form first-hand judgments of their personalities. He was in constant communication with representatives of the German government, with the agents of other governments in the diplomatic corps, with international leaders who came to Berlin, with American citizens, high and low, engaged in political, economic, and journalistic activities in Germany. As a participant in the scenes described, he had opportunities for analysis and interpretation not always granted even to investigators inside the circle of official and social intimacy.
In addition to Dodd’s privileged perspective and remarkable acumen, he brings to this memoir a scholarly experience and literary gift: “[T]he training and experience in historical study and writing which Mr. Dodd brought to bear upon his journal are clearly revealed in it and distinguish it from whole libraries of diplomatic memoirs compiled by professional gossips. They give the diary a quality which makes it peculiarly significant for an understanding of our own times.” Beard concludes that “when the history of our troubled age is written, in distant years to come, this journal will be regarded as a priceless source of primary information and a vibrant human document illustrating American character in this period” (pp. xv-xvi).
¶ (History) Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Story of Mount Desert Island Maine. With illustrations. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press I Little, Brown, (1960).
8vo.; pictorially stamped cloth; library label on spine; dust-jacket; light wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition, second printing of Morison’s history of Mount Desert Island, Maine, a Penobscott Bay neighbor to Fuller’s beloved Bear Island. Fuller’s grandmother purchased Bear Island in 1904, and “colonized” it with her two daughters and their families. “Bear Island, thereafter the family’s summer retreat and still the chief geographical constant in his life, presented themes with which all his later speculations have comported” (Kenner, 68). Fuller’s earliest observations of the design principles of nature date to those summers, for example a patented “Rowing Device” imitating the movement of a jellyfish, and “ten- sionally partitioned gramophone record cabinets” in use ever since. With Jim Hardie Fuller built a road on a swamp, and the first tennis court on the island, managing to move ton upon ton of stone with horse and oxen. When threatened with financial ruin in the 1930s, Fuller lost his share in Bear Island for a time, but recouped it years later.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Inscribed for ‘Bucky’ Fuller by Sam Morison. 1961. With Fuller’s three word pencil note on the rear endpaper.
Morison, who authored of over three dozen books and over one hundred articles, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 in consideration of his life and work, well after the publication of The Oxford History of the United States (1927) and his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Christopher Columbus, for which he outfitted the barkentine Capitana with provisions and followed in Columbus’ wakeif not footstepswith a commission as Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve in 1942. Fuller was not aboard the Capitana, but did sail with Morison on a later voyage. (They met through family member Gee Stearns, a sailor on the 1942 journey.) After his return Morison began his fifteen volume History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II.
¶ (History) Morison, Samuel Eliot. “Old Bruin” COMMODORE MATTHEW C. Perry 1794-1858. Boston: Little, Brown / Atlantic Monthly Press, (1967).
8vo.; cloth; light wear; library label on spine; dust-jacket; light wear; library label on spine.
First edition of this biography whose subtitle tells its story: “The American naval officer who helped found Liberia, hunted pirates in the West Indies, practised diplomacy with the Sultan of Turkey and the King of the Two Sicilies; commanded the Gulf squadron in the Mexican War, promoted the steam navy and the shell gun, and conducted the naval expedition which opened Japan.” Perry provided a fitting subject for Morison, among the leading naval historians of the 2O‘h century. With Fuller’s note on the front endpaper: R. Buckminster Fuller from my sister Rosy Xmas 1967and by my friend Sam Morison.
¶ (History) Morison, Samuel Eliot. VlTA NUOVA: A Memoir OF PRISCILLA Barton Morison. Northeast Harbor, ME: N.P., 1975.
8vo.; several dozen black and white photographs, color frontispiece; cloth.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky Fuller from one of his great admirers Samuel Morison. Signed by Fuller, and dated Nov 26 1975 beneath. With a typed letter carbon from Fuller to Morison complimenting the book affixed to the front pastedown.
¶ (History) Mowat, Farley. WESTVIKING. The ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press / Little, Brown, (1965).
8vo.; cloth; light wear; top edge sunned; dust-jacket; price clipped; library label on spine; edgeworn; small chip.
First edition, sixth printing, of Mowat’s overview of the traces of Viking exploration and settlement in North America. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Buckminster Fuller with much admirationFarley Mowat. 1968. Mowat is best-known for his unflagging support of environmental causes, especially endangered species and dwindling communities of indigenous peoples.
¶ Hoenich, P.K. Design with Sunrays: A New Technology in Art. Research No. AR10 of the Faculty of Architecture, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Haifa, Israel: Technion Research and Development Foundation, July 1965.
4to.; black and white photographs; four full-color plates tipped in; wrappers; taped spine; lightly used.
First edition of this illustrated guide printed in Hebrew and English, with many black and white printed photographic illustrations, as well as several color illustrations tipped-in; 300 copies. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To R. Buckminster Fuller I P.K. Hoenich.
¶ Hulten, K.G. Pontus. The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, (1968).
8vo.; block and white photographs; color embossed metal covers, illustrated and textured library label on spine.
First edition of this compendium of “the machine,” allotting a page or two per design, painting, sculpture, invention, or other work. Hulten devotes one page to Fuller’s “Dy- maxion Car, 1933,” with a photograph, scale drawing, and history. A landmark exhibition and one of the most distinctive catalogues published by MoMA.
¶ (India) Annual of Architecture, Structure and Townplanning. Volume 2. Calcutta: The Publishing Corporation of India, (1961).
8vo.; illustrated; black cloth; dust-jacket; edgeworn; extremities nicked; round sticker on spine.
This volume of the Annual includes articles on “The Future of Modern Architecture and City Planning” by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, Maurice Rotival, Alfred Rother, Edward D. Stone, Eduardo Torroja, William Holford, M. Yamasaki, E.N. Rogers, and Kunio Mayekawa. It includes sections devoted to “buildings and projects” worldwide; Tropical architecture and planning; Housing; New University Schemes in the Tropics; Sports Architecture; Planning; Structure, Materials and Equipments; and international reviews, notes, and news.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Dr. B. Fuller, With the best compliments from younger Indian Foundation of Architects. With two unidentified signatures dated 2817161.
¶ (India) Basic Development Plan for the Calcutta Metropolitan DISTRICT 1966-1986. Calcutta: Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization . . . Government of West Bengal, 1966.
4to.; illustrated; one pull-out map; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; slightly sunned and edgeworn.
First edition. With a two-page stapled document and errata sheet loosely inserted: “International Planning Seminar on Calcutta Metropolitan Plan, January 8-15, 1967.”
¶ (India) Elwin, Verrier. The Art of the North-East Frontier of India. Shillong: North-East Frontier Agency, (1959).
8vo.; black and white and color illustrations and photographs; tan cloth, pictorially stamped; lightly soiled; dust-jacket; two small chips.
First edition.
¶ (India) Erikson, Erik H. Gandhi’s Truth. New York: Norton, (1969).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket.
First edition of this massive psychological study, the result of years of research by Erikson in India and elsewhere. A presentation copy, inscribed: Hoping for a meeting. Erik H. Erikson.
Like Fuller, Erikson, who died in 1994 in the United States, his adopted home, was an intellectual globe trotter. He studied painting both in Germany, where he was born, and in Italy. With Peter Bios and Dorothy Burlingham he developed a school for children in Vienna, where he later earned a degree from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In the early ‘30s Erikson emigrated to America, where he practiced psychoanalysis while conducting research at Harvard Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, University of California at Berkeley, and the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Among his teaching appointments was a nine-year stint at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and a professorship in human development and lectureship in psychiatry at Harvard University. His books include Childhood in Society (1950), his foundational statement challenging conservative Freudians; Young Man Luther (1958), in which Erikson “emphasized the universal process of resolution of identity conflicts during this developmental phase”; Identity and the Life Cycle (1959); Youth: Change and Challenge (1963), which he edited; and Insight and Responsibility (1964) and Identity, Youth and Crisis (1967), two collections of essays derived from his Harvard lectures.
¶ (India) Nanda, B.R. MAHATMA Gandhi. A biography. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., (1959).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; rear panel rubbed; library label on spine.
First edition, second printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Dr. Buckminster Fuller with regards from the author. B.R. Nanda. 19.11.69.
¶ (India) Singh, Karan. TOWARDS A New India. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, (1974).
8vo.; red cloth; dust-jacket; spine slightly sunned; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller, citizen of the 21st century, with cordial greetings Karan Singh 8th October 1974.
Singh, born into a prominent political family, began his own career at the age of 18 when, in 1949, his father (the Maharaja Hari) appointed him Regent on the intervention of Prime Minister Nehru. Appointed or elected to many positions over subsequent yearsincluding Ambassador to the United Stateshe became “a unique instance of the last representative of the old order becoming, by the will of the people, the first representative of the new” (http://www.greencrossinternational.net). A philanthropist, he was a true public servant, devoting his energies and personal funds to the humanitarian needs and cultural development of his country, and refusing any type of support from the government in exchange. “With his deep insight into the Indian cultural tradition, as well as his wide exposures to Western literature and civilization,…Singh has come to be recognized as an outstanding thinker and leader in India and abroad. He is a renowned orator, and has lectured in five continents on philosophy and culture, politics and the environment” (ibid.).
In 1970 Fuller was commissioned by the Indian government - specifically, by the airport ministry, then headed by Karan Singh - to design the international airports in New Delhi, Bombay, and Madras, in conjunction with his partner in the firm Fuller and Sadao. Sadao, a former student of his at Cornell and a long time friend, also worked with Fuller as cartographer in the publication of the “Dymaxion Airocean World” World Map developed in 1952 and published in 1954. Fuller introduced Sadao to Isamu Noguchi, to whom he became a very close friend and associate in the Noguchi Fountain firm. Sadao later served as Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in Long Island City, New York for many years..
¶ (India) Students’ Society of Architecture and Town Planning. SSAT Souvenir. Published on the occasion of the fulfillment of ten years of the department of architecture and town 8c regional planning, Bengal Engineering College, Howrah, India. Editor Monidi Chatterjee. Sibpur: Literary Secretary, SSAT, B.E. College, n.d.
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; lightly soiled; library label.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Dr. R. B. Fuller I With Best Compliments I from the I Architecture Dept. I B.E. College I Howrah I India. G.K. Paknikar / Head of Arch. Dept.
¶ (Israel) Hellner, Moshe. An Alternative to the Layout Patterns of the 1968 Master Plan for Jerusalem. London: [Privately published], 1971.
8vo.; illustrated; several pull-out maps; wrappers; spiral bound.
First edition of this significant, heavily illustrated report on Jerusalem. A presentation copy, inscribed inside the front panel: To Richard Buckminster Fuller I Your comments will be much appreciated. Moshe Hellner / London June 1971, with Hellner’s New York state address at the foot of the page, and Fuller’s “received” stamp dated August 12,1971.
¶ (Israel) Kollek, Teddy and Moshe Pearlman. JERUSALEM: SACRED City OF Mankind: A History of Forty Centuries. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa: Steimatzky’s Limited, (1968).
8vo.; 140 black and white illustrations, 64 color plates; cloth, pictorially stamped in gilt; photographic dust-jacket; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition of this volume in which Kollek, the first Mayor of the reunited Jerusalem, and Pearlman (“writer, soldier, diplomat and government official”), capture the “drama and flavour” of Jerusalem “from earliest times to the present dayright up to the re-uni- fication of the city in the Six Day War of June 1967.” A copy inscribed by Kollek to Fuller as a gift from “the students of Design Bezalel Academywith profound respect,” with a card so reading loosely inserted, signed by over fifty students; inscribed on the illustrated flyleaf: To Professor R. Buckminster Fuller with all good wises Teddy Kollek Jerusalem December 1970.
¶ (Israel) Sharon, Arieh. Planning Jerusalem: The Old City and its Environs. Planning Team of the Outline Townplanning Scheme: Arieh Sharon, David Anatol Brutzkus, Elda Sharon, Architects and Townplanners. Art Editor and Design: Chava Mordohovich. Jerusalem: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, (1973).
4to.; 71 full-color mops, 175 block and white photographs, 27 plans and 28 reproductions of ancient maps, lithographs and etchings; cloth; dust-jacket; edges buckling; publishers slipcase, edges sunned.
First edition. A presentation copy, with a printed gift plaque affixed to the front endpaper: Presented to [filled in: Prof. R. Buckminster Fuller] on the occasion of the Second Plenary Session of the Jerusalem Committee 18-21 June, 1973, and signed by Teddy Kollek, the Mayor of Jerusalem, who writes in his introduction:
The Old City of Jerusalem is unique. Its religious, historical, archaeological and architectural treasures are part of the world’s heritage. At the same time it is the home of thousands of people, of adherents of the three great religions, of Jews, Moslems and Christians, of young and old. The Municipality of Jerusalem, together with the Ministry of the Interior, present herein a proposal for the future of this area, which holds so much significance for so many….
…the plan that is presented in the following pages envisages a living city, a unity between the old and the new. We hope that those who study it will understand how important the Old City is to us who must plan for it; how much we have sacrificed and are willing to continue to sacrifice for its sake….
¶ (Israel) Sharon, Arieh. KlBBUTZ & BAUHAUS. An architect’s way in a new land.
(Massada, Israel / Stuttgart” Massada Publishing Ltd. / Karl Kramer Verlag, 1976.)
4to.; black and white photographs and illustrations; text printed in English, German, and French; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; wear to extremities; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To our friend Bucky from Hayes and Arieh. In his foreword, Bruno Zevi writes of this volume that it “blends and synthesizes three books into one.”
Firstly, there is the novel of a life made up of rare ingredients: socialism, Zionism, kibbutz, Bauhaus, national planning, architecture on a local, then on an international scale. In the second place, there is the story of building a country, agricultural settlements, urban housing, hospitals, exhibition pavilions, universities, up to the reconstruction of a united Jerusalem. Finally, we have the record of an architect, his creative products, his space-tome language in the dynamics of its numerous contemporary trends.
¶ (Japan) Uhlan, Edward and Dana L. Thomas. SHORIKI, Miracle Man OF Japan. A Biography. Foreword by Bob Considine. Illustrated. New York: Exposition Press, (1957).
8vo.; endpapers browned; red cloth; library label on spine; dust-jacket; light wear to extremities; spine sunned.
First edition of this biography of media mogul Matsutaro Shoriki, who financed it. A presentation copy, inscribed by the subject on the first blank: To Mr. Fuller From M. Shoriki March 1, 1961. Shoriki was an early important figure in the development of Fuller’s enthusiasm for Japan. In the early 1960s, under Yomiuri Shimbon direction, he and Anne spent a month in touring the country, a visit which resulted in increased recognition in the East of Fuller’s work, as well as in the construction of the Yomiuri Star Golf Club Field House in Tokyo, designed as a 170 foot diameter hemisphere tensegrity geodesic dome considered by Fuller one of his most important.
In 1966 Fuller was commissioned by Shoriki “to undertake a design feasibility study for a 12,250 foot observation tower, which was to overtop the height of Mount Fuji on the island of Honshu. In view of the fact that at the time the world’s tallest building was the Empire State Building at 1472 feet, including TV towers, and the tallest man-made structure was a 2000 foot TV transmission tower a mere one sixth the proposed tower height, totally-new-for-humanity considerations necessarily came into play. Our tightly phased, detailed engineering report contained 10,000 words…” Shoriki’s budget was $300 millionnot enough, according to his feasibility study. Therefore Fuller’s study detailed specifications for a 8000 foot tower, as well, which Shoriki in theory would have been able to afford. Among Fuller’s “formidable safe working assumptions” were helicopter rescue operations from the observation section at the top should the elevator fail” (Fuller, 1981, 337-38).
¶ Kanin, Garson. It Takes a Long Time TO Become Young. An Entertainment in the form of a declaration of war on the mindless youth cult that has our time in its grip; demoralizing our people, weakening our system, depleting our energy, feeding our depression, wasting our experience, betraying our democracy, and blowing out brains. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Sc Company, Inc., 1978.
8vo.; blue half cloth; dust-jacket; light edgewear; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: 5.H.79 For Buckminster Fullerin all admirationGarson Kanin NYC. A note on the back of the front endpaper in a different hand reads “149. BF.” and Fuller himself wrote on the front cover is: B.E pg. 149 Inscribed to B.F. signed by author. On that page begins the following testimony to Fuller’s achievements: “The remarkable R. Buckminster Fuller, also in his eighties, continues to exercise his soaring imagination and to produce new inventions to put beside his geodesic dome and Dymaxion dwelling machine” (pp. 149-50). Allegra Fuller Snyder notes that at the time of this inscription Kanin was married to actress Marian Seldes, daughter of Gilbert Seldes and Allegra’s best friend since their third grade year at the Dalton Schools. “Marian had been very close to the Fuller family as a whole,” she writes, “so Bucky Fuller looked upon her as a very special, almost second daughter” {email to Glenn Horowitz, October 2003).
140BKepes, Gyorgy. LANGUAGE OF VISION. With introductory essays by S. Giedionand S.I. Hayakawa. (Chicago): Paul Theobald, 1948.
8vo.; black and white illustrations, and one in color; cloth; spine frayed.
First edition of this volume printed entirely on coated paper and with partial and full-page black and white illustrations to nearly every page, and a handful of color illustrations throughout. With essays by Giedion (“Art Means Reality”), Hayakawa (“The Revision of Vision”), and Kepes (“The Language of Vision”).
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky with the hope that we can see each other more frequently than we do and to Allegra with thanks for the opportunity to write in this book. Gy orgy Kepes. Signed by Fuller in pencil at the top of the page, with his note: From Allegra Xmas 1950 Andover-Massachusetts.
Fuller’s path crossed regularly with that of Hungarian-born painter and photographer Gyorgy Kepes, who left his mark on design theory primarily through his studies of light and color. From 1930 to 1936 he worked in Berlin and London, designing for motion pictures, stage productions, and commercial exhibitions, but in 1937 emigrated to the United States to head the light and color department of the Institute of Design in Chicago. By the time Fuller joined their faculty in 1948, Kepes had moved to MIT, where Fuller spoke regularly between 1949 and 1956, and again in the mid-1970s. Since 1967 he has been director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His writings include Language of Vision (1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956). Allegra Fuller Snyder writes, “Bucky and Kepes engaged in many important conversations over the years” (email to Glenn Horowitz, October 2003).
¶ Koestler, Arthur. The SLEEPWALKERS. A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. New York: The Universal Library, (1963).
8vo.; printed wrappers; rubbed and edgeworn; library label on spine.
Universal Library edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: From one sleepwalker to another,amitiesArthur Koestler Alpbach, 25.7.64, with an added note below: Sorry, I’ve only got a paperback up here, I was delighted to discover that you share my liking for Kepler. With a black and white photographic postcard loosely inserted, picturing “Alpbach in Tirol 1000 m,” with Fuller’s note: “This is godly ekistics.”
¶ (Literature) Boothe, Clare. KlSS THE Boys GOOD-BYE. A comedy. With a foreword by Heywood Broun. New York: Random House, (1939).
8vo.; offsetting from newspaper clipping at introduction; cloth; spine sunned. In a specially made cloth slipcase. First edition of Boothe’s most lasting play, a veiled allegory about Fascism in America; with an introduction by Heywoud Broun and a foreword by Boothe. Loosely inserted is a tear sheet of Broun’s review, in which he reinforces Boothe’s lament that most theatregoers and even theatre critics seem to have missed the point.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to R. Buckminster Fuller: For Buckywith deep admiration love Clare.
Sylvia Jukes Morris, in Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce, describes Fuller as Boothe’s “new admirer” on February 7, 1934; they would later be rumored to have had an affair, but on that evening he was her escort, and charioted her to Hartford,
Connecticut, in his Dymaxion car. “Bubble-shaped and streamlined,” she writes, “the vehicle was a marvel of automotive engineering: it could turn within its own length and allegedly reach 125 mph at 40 miles to the gallon.” It also turned heads, as they drove, with a third passenger (Dorothy Hale), to the world premiere of Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Their mutual friend, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, would join them there. (Noguchi’s first portrait in marble was of Luce, whose renowned penthouse parties were a regular stop on their social circuit.) Though no further affair is documented, the two clearly developed a lasting friendship, attested to by this inscription. Years later Luce asserted that Fuller was one of the brightest men she had ever met; he asserted that she married Henry Luce on the rebound from their relationship. “Whether or not this is strictly true, it makes some sort of sense,” Wilfrid Sheed writes in his biography of Luce. “Fuller is an intellectual adventurer, not a social butterfly and Clare always speaks fondly of ‘Bucky.’ Finally, he had a big head (literally) which is a common attribute of Clare’s beaux” (Clare Boothe Luce, NY: Dutton, 1982, p. 67).
Through Clare’s marriage to Henry Luce, Fuller became the Science and Technology Consultant for Fortune Magazine from 1938–1940 and was responsible for the 10th anniversary issue printing the first publication of the “one world island” map. Throughout Clare’s marriage, literary success (especially with The Women) and political careerin 1943 and 1944 she was elected to the House of Representatives, and in 1952 was named Ambassador to Italy she and Fuller remained good friends.
¶ (Literature) Bradbury, Ray. Haunted Computer and the Android Pope. New York: Knopf, 1981.
8vo.; grey topstain; tan paper-covered boards, stamped in gilt, red cloth spine; dust-jacket.
First edition of this volume of verse. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky Fuller with awe & admiration! From Ray Bradbury July 9, 1982.
¶ (Literature) Buckley, William F. Jr.. INVEIGHING We Will Go. New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, (1972).
8vo.; black cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed and edgeworn.
First edition of this selection of Buckley’s articles, columns, and essays. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Buckminster Fuller From an admirer, who values so greatly your spontaneous act of friendship in JuneBill Buckley. Fuller and Buckley met at the University of Virginia, following Fuller’s baccalaureate address. Fuller told his more conservative dinner companion, “I would have assumed that I would not like you, but I find you charming.” To which Buckley replied, “We should get out a joint manifesto” (Hatch, p. 223). Fuller is mentioned in “What Is Israel?,” published from Jerusalem on February 3,1972: “…The point is: Israel is at war with nations which made war on Israel. Now Israel is in operational command of territories which were used to wage war against her. Israel isn’t going to give up those territories in response to plausible and exquisitely symmetrical proposals that spring out of the mind of Mr. Jarring, or Mr. Rogers, or even Buckminster Fuller” (p. 192).
¶ (Literature) Clarke, Arthur C. The TREASURE OF THE Great Reef. With a new Preface and Epilogue by the author. New York: Ballantine Books, (1974).
8vo.; with black and white and color plates; printed wrappers; edgeworn; library label on spine.
Second edition. A presentation copy, inscribed just after the Fullers’ visit to Clarke’s home in Colombo, Sri Lanka: To Buckyhere’s the part of Sri Lanka I couldn’t show you! Love from Arthur 16 Mar 78 Colombo.
Clarke and Fuller were the leaders of their generation in the “large-scale direct linkage of futures thinking to long-range planning,” according to Darlene E. Weingand. Though Clarke is best-known today for 2001: A Space Odyssey, throughout his career he used his background in math and physics actively to develop an understanding of underwater and extra-terrestrial terrain. In the 1940s, for example, he pioneered the idea of a global TV satellite and in the mid-1950s settled in Sri Lanka for the deep-sea diving. In 1972 he was a founding member of the World Advisory Council of the Design Science Institute, “a tax- exempt foundation whose purpose is to ‘encourage, stimulate and advance the philosophy and words of R. Buckminster Fuller on a worldwide scale’ ” (Hatch, p. 265). In 1974 Fuller wrote to a student of Clarke’s ideas:
Arthur is a very good friend of mine and I don’t want to seem competitive or smarter than him, however, if you read Nine Chains to the Moon (chapter on “the Xian”) printed in 1938, you will come to the first science fiction in which travel of pattern integrity by electromagnetic scanning is clearly described and anticipated.
¶ (Literature) Clarke, Arthur C. The FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1979).
8vo.; cloth; top edge sunned; dust-jacket; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, with Clarke’s gift card bearing a color photograph of Sri Kanda, where the novel is set (and where Clarke ultimately settled, in Sri Lanka), taped to the front endpaper: Dear BuckyI hope this photo evokes happy memories! Thanks for everythingand take it easy the world needs you! All the best from all of us hereArthur Dec 78. This inscription was made several months after the copy of The Treasure of the Great Reef described above.
¶ (Literature) (Conrad, Joseph) Conrad’s Manifesto: Preface TO A Career. The history of the preface to The Nigger Of The “Narcissus," with facsimiles of the manuscripts edited with an essay by David R. Smith. Philadelphia: (The Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation), 1966.
4to.; marbled paper-covered boards, title label on front panel; publisher s sleeve and slipcase, title label on spine; library label on spine.
First edition, trade issue; 1000 copies; 1100 copies the entire edition; an unnumbered out of series copy. A birthday gift to Fuller from Margy and Martin Meyerson, with their note, dated July 7, 1981, loosely inserted.
Martin Meyerson, known worldwide for his groundbreaking work in city planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and higher education, brought Fuller on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was University Professor and later, President) in 1972 as a World Fellow in Residence. That appointment, and their friendship, lasted until his death.
¶ (Literature) Cousins, Norman. PRESENT Tense. An American Editor’s Odyssey.
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, (1967).
8vo.; green and black cloth; dust-jacket; top edge slightly worn; library label on spine.
First edition of this hefty compendium of Cousin’s editorials. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky, the most original and creative mind I have ever known, and one of the noblest human beings of this or any other generation. With love, Norman New York Sept 1967. Fuller is mentioned as part of the American delegation to Leningrad in “More Talks with the Russians,” first published on September 26, 1964.
Cousins, whose award shelf is crowded not just with literary prizes and nearly 50 honorary degrees from institutions worldwide, but with citations for his peace efforts, as well, received the United Nations Peace Medal, the American Peace Award, the Family of Man Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award, the Personal Medallion of Pope John XXIII, and the City of Hiroshima Award for heading the project that delivered medical and surgical treatment to victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fuller befriended him during the 1964 “Dartmouth Conference” held in Leningrad, which included 25 American and 30 Soviet leaders in various disciplines. (James Michener, John Galbraith, and David Rockefeller were among the other participants from the United States.) After that meeting, Cousins commissioned an article from Fuller for the Saturday Review: “The Prospect for Humanity” appeared in 1964, and five other pieces followed over the ensuing decade.
Recalling an “intellectual gladiatorial contest” at that conference between Fuller and the Russian futurist Fyodorovwhich resulted in the Russian contingency ranking him “side-by-side with Franklin and Edison” (Fuller, 1981, p.190)Cousins later wrote,
The most important part is not transmittable, except by Bucky. And that is the sense that he clearly conveys, that it is possible to have a better worlds than we have today. That the universe is waiting to cooperate with us if only we know how to tune in properly to it and understand its laws as well as its allures.
This is in the sense that there is a universal citizenship, or a citizenship of the Universe, beyond our existing parochial citizenships. And that there is a realm of cognition far beyond our limited horizons. Bucky becomes a master guide to this realm. I know no man who makes you feel so perfectly at home in the Universe as he does…” (Hatch, p. 224–25)
In his foreword to Sieden’s study, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe, Cousins puts it even more succinctly: “Bucky was not only inspired and nourished by the weightless and allembracing entity called the human mind; he had a way of opening our minds to the phenomena within it. In this way, he introduced us to ourselves” (Sieden, p. ix).
In 1965 both were part of the President’s Commission on the International Cooperation Year. Cousins co-chaired the 1969 Dartmouth Conference sequel in Rye, New York, which Fuller also attended. According to scholars, “The off-the-record Dartmouth Conferences initiated by Norman Cousins have enabled influential Soviets and Americans to set the stage for track one agreements banning above-ground nuclear tests, installing the original ‘hot line,’ expanding trade, and allowing direct flights between the United States and the Soviet Union” (Michael Shuman, Gale Warner, and Lila Forest, in In Context, 15, Winter 1987). In 1972 they shared the announcement of the publication of World magazine, to which Fuller would contribute over two dozen articles in the next two years. Also that year Cousins helped found the Design Science Institue. As a final testament to their friendship, there was a photograph, which hung in several of Bucky’s offices, of the boot of Italy taken from a plane, seeming to show the curvature of the earth. Norman had sent it to him, inscribed “…of all the human beings I know, you have liberated yourself most from earth constrictionsnot just specific gravity but general modes of fixed thought.” (“Norman Cousins,” BFI.org)
¶ (Literature) (Fuller, Margaret) McMaster, Helen Neill. MARGARET FULLER AS A Literary Critic. The University of Buffalo Studies, VII.3 (December, 1928), Monographs in English No. 1.
8vo.; wrappers; stapled; front panel detached; lightly worn and soiled.
First edition of this Masters thesis on Fuller’s great-aunt. McMaster’s essays include “Ghosts,” “Corinne,” “Mignon: Goethe and Rome,” “La Femme Libre,” “Chipping Marble,” “Miranda,” and “Tiring-Woman to the Muses.” She also includes a note on the magazines of the 1840s, and a bibliography. Loosely inserted is a one-page transcription of Fuller’s gravestone:
In memory of Margaret Fuller Ossoli born in Cambridge, Mass. May 23,1810. By birth a child of New England, by adoption a citizen of Rome, by genius belonging to the world. In youth an insatiate student seeking the highest culture, in riper years teacher, writer, critic of literature and art, in maturer age companion and helper of many, earnest reformer in America and Europe. And of her husband Giovanni Angelo Marquis Ossoli. He gave up rank, station and home for the Roman Republic and for his wife and child. And of that child Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, bom in Rieti, Italy, Sept. 5,1848, whose dust reposes at the foot of this stone. They passed from this life together by ship wreck July 19, 1850.
Lloyd Steven Sieden offers a useful gloss on Fuller’s ideological kinship with his pioneering ancestor:
Although she died decades before Bucky’s birth, Margaret Fuller’s influence endured within the Fuller family, and young Bucky was not exempt from it. He was told stories of his famous aunt, her distinguished cohorts, and their Nature-based philosophy which stressed the divine orderliness of the Universe.
Years later, when Bucky himself began to establish his comprehensivist philosophy, he could not help but be influenced by the connection between human beings and all nature which Margaret had championed. His philosophy would, however, also include the mechanical technology which was just beginning to seriously influence lifestyles when Transcendentalism was flourishing and which was overlooked or viewed as a negative influence by most Transcendentalists. Bucky felt that natural creations such as the human hand represented technology at its finest and believed that the best human-created technology was that which most closely mirrored Nature’s creations. (Sieden, pp. 2–3)
¶ (Literature) Gilbert, Lynn and Gaylen Moore. PARTICULAR PASSIONS: Talks with women who have shaped our times. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., (1981).
8vo.; black and white portrait photographs; green paper-covered boards, white cloth spine; white dust- jacket; price-clipped; spine bumped; library label on spine.
First edition; a combination of biographical sketches and first-hand accounts of the struggles and successes of 46 women, each a standard-bearer in her field, with full-page black and white photographs of each.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper by one of the contributors: Dear Dr. Fuller, I am very grateful for the great privilege of having published your beautiful graphic work. All my best wishes! Tatyana Grosman. Wet Islip, N.Y. 12/8’1981. With Fuller’s checkmarks next to several names in the table of contents: Frances Steloff, Tatyana Grosman, Dorothy Canning Miller, Margaret Mead, Ada Louise Huxtable, Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, Judianne Densen-Gerber, Betty Friedan. Other subjects include Lillian Hellman, Agnes de Mille, Gloria Steinem, Diana Vreeland, Julia Child, Sarah Caldwell, Billie Jean King, and Barbara Walters.
Grosman, whose Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) which became known, in the 1960s, as one of the finest print workshops in the world, was introduced to Fuller in 1975. The meeting lead to a collaboration that resulted in Tetrascroll in 1977. Ostensibly the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as told by Fuller to his daughter Allegra, Tetrascroll was a tour de force of design. A historian at the Buckminster Fuller Institute describes it as “a lithographic book-object that consisted of twenty-six pages bound together by the sturdy Dacron that is most commonly used in sailmaking. Each page was a thirty- six-inch equilateral triangle, one of the four faces of the tetrahedron, which Bucky has established as the basic unit in nature. Each triangle page contained text and one of Bucky’s engaging drawings, which he had executed with crayon and pencil on lithographic stone.” After publication, Tetrascroll was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and at a Manhattan art gallery, and for the first time in its history, ULAE joined forces with a commercial publisher (St. Martin’s Press) to bring out a trade edition of one of its titles.
¶ (Literature) Haley, Alex. ROOTS. Garden City: Doubleday, (1976).
8vo.; paper-covered boards, cloth spine; dust-jacket.
First edition, later printing, of this Pulitzer Prize-winning work. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: July 7, 1980 For Bucky and Anna Fullervery warmest wishes, you lovely people, from me and the whole ROOTS family ofKunta Kinte! Sincerely, Alex Haley. Kunta Kinte is, of course, the protagonist of this landmark novelization of the life of one of Haley’s ancestors, an African man enslaved in the American South. Roots was so popular that two years after its debut it had won, according to one critic, 271 awards, and had sold over eight-and-a-half million copies in twenty-six languages.
¶ (Literature) Hemingway, Mary Welsh. How It Was. New York: Knopf, 1976.
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; light wear; library label on spine.
First edition of the autobiography of Hemingway’s fourth wife. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For R. Buckminster Fuller with profound admiration. Mary Hemingway, Chicago 8th. Oct. 1976. With a notation, 534, indicating the page on which Fuller is mentioned: “Not long ago R. Buckminster Fuller, a master in circles of such thinking, publicly reaffirmed his faith in man’s capacity to adapt to changing environments, to develop new capabilities, and so to survive. ‘We have the option,’ he said. I find his cool appraisal solacing, even though an option may not imply hope.”
With Fuller’s pencil note on the half-title: loved outdoors I big drinker I her mother thought she should go everywhere w/ at least one book.
¶ (Literature) Houston, Peyton. SONNET VARIATIONS. Highlands: Jonathan Williams, 1962.
8vo.; wrappers; light wear; rear panel damp stained.
First edition of this collection of poems. Signed on the first blank, R. Buckminster Fuller Jan 1963. A devoted poet in his own right, Fuller published three volumes of poetryincluding one under Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society imprintand held a poetry chair at Harvard University during thel961-62 academic year.
¶ (Literature) MacLeish, Archibald. HEAVEN AND Earth AND THE Cage OF Form. From The Rockefeller University Review, January-February 1968.
8vo.; wrappers; stapled; lightly used; library label on spine.
Offprint, paginated l-[10], with only the stubs of pages 11–20 present. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first text page: Buckminster Fuller: For the “verb” and much else, my thanks. Archie MacLeish. With MacLeish’s mailing label affixed to an envelope fragment taped inside the front cover. MacLeish’s appreciation of Fuller’s work dates to the early 1930s: In 1932 he published an article in Fortune magazine on “The Industry Industry Missed: The Mass-Production Housing Industry.”
¶ (Literature) (Miller, Henry) Snyder, Robert. This IS HENRY, Henry Miller FROM Brooklyn. Conversations with the author from The Henry Miller Odyssey. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, (1974).
8vo.; black and white photographs and illustrations; purple cloth with a Miller letter reproduced in gilt on the cover; dust-jacket; light wear to tope edge; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper by Fuller’s son-in-law Robert Snyder: Christmas, 1974 For Lord Bucky and Lady Anne, with all good wishes and love. Yours, Bob. With the Fullers’ signatures, Buckminster Fuller and Lady Anne.
¶ (Literature) Morley, Christopher. PREFACES WITHOUT BOOKS. Prefaces and introductions to thirty books. Selected by Herman Abromson with an introduction by Jerome Weidman. [Austin, TX]: The University of Texas Humanities Research Center, (1970).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; light wear; two small chips.
First edition of this collection of literary prefaces. A presentation copy, inscribed by the editor on the front endpaper by the editor: 2.114176 For Buckminster FullerWith great respect for his genius and admiration for his humility. A man Chris Morley admired and loved. Herman Abromson. Signed by Fuller beneath the inscription on February 27,1976. For a detailed examination of Fuller’s relationship with Morley, refer to item #1.
¶ (Literature) Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. A story of comfort in desolation. London: Jonathan Cape, (1955).
8vo.; discrete Durban book store label on rear pastedown; cloth; lightly rubbed.
First edition, twenty-fourth printing, of Patons’ runaway best-seller, a moving indictment of racism in South Africa. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Buckminster Fuller with best wishes from Alan Paton / Kloof / 25/5/58.
INSCRIBED BY EZRA POUND
¶ (Literature)Pound, Ezra. ABC OF READING. London: Faber and Faber, (1951).
12mo.; wrappers; very light wear.
New edition, 2670 copies, with an additional 3500 sheets printed for New Directions to issue in their “New Classics Series.” Gallup A35. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank: To Buckminster Fuller/Ezra Pound.
Pound’s biographer Hugh Kenner notes that Pound first met Fuller in October 1970. “[H]e heard Buckminster Fuller lecture in Venice at the International University of Art; and part of Fuller’s subject was Ezra Pound. He returned; he listened to four long Fuller discourses; the two men talked; a copy of Fuller’s Nehru Memorial Lecture changed hands; Pound listened to it, sitting up later at night. Men are impoverished it says, by an accounting system ‘anchored exclusively to the value of metals.’ But all wealth comes ‘from the wealth of the minds of world man.’ ” They met again on June 29, 1971, at the Spoleto Festival, at which Pound would inscribed a copy of Ezra Pound in Italy to Fuller: “To Buckminster Fuller, friend of the universe, bringer of happiness, liberator, …” (see next item).
INSCRIBED BY EZRA POUND
¶ (Literature)(Pound, Ezra) Contino, Vittorugo. Ezra Pound IN ITALY. From the Pisan Cantos: Spots and Dots. (Venice: 1970).
4to; black and white photographs; paper-covered boards. With a plain dust-jacket, typed “Inscribed copy of Ezra Pound In Italy, To Buckminster Fuller,” worn with some tape repair.
First edition, published for Pound’s 85th birthday. With an introduction by Pound and a foreword by Contino. Combines Contino’s photographs of Pound and of places and things in the Pisan Cantos. Pound writes, “My seeing them again in 1968 was due to the initiative and energy of Contino who has shown remarkable persistence in trying to make the selection as significant as possible.” With facsimile texts “which,” he notes, “I read in the course of interviews with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Vanni Ronsisvalle for an Italian documentary.”
A presentation copy, inscribed by Ezra Pound on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller I friend of the universe I bringer of happiness I liberator / with affectionate admiration. Ezra Pound/ Spoleto /June 29th 1971.
Contino elucidates his purpose in his foreword:
I decided to show Pound the man, now at the end of his life, without thoughts of his past. To take him to places recorded in his “Pisan Cantos” for my camera to catch his reactions. I confess that its mobility did not equal Pound’s penetrating eye which pins down thoughts, strips a conscience bare, with the same thoroughness as do his words. Olga Rudge seconded my project and I got a pointer from her: “You see, E. may seem detached, no longer interested, on the contrary he follows everything …”
Add to his work of genius: generosity, humility, shynessthe human attributes. These photographic compositions will not give an exact evaluation of the Poet’s personality…
Collaborations between writers and photographers usually create difficulties. My difficulties in this case were resolved by Pound’s respect for the liberty of others. He vetoed anything in the book which might be considered as vanity; the second part of it he passed only out of consideration for my liberty. . . . While compiling it I added, as it cropped up, evidence of Pound’s more recent expressions of opinion …
¶ (Literature) (Pound, Ezra) VENEZIA 1951–1971. Venti anni di attivita della fon- dazione giorgio cini. Venice: Nuova Editoriale, (1971).
8vo.; black and white photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed and scuffed; in the publishers cardboard slipcase; worn; library label on spine; separately printed collection of testimonies, wrappers.
First edition of this history of San Giorgio, along with Testimonialize A San Giorgio, a collection of one-page recollections, each printed in the native language of the contributing scholar. A gift copy sent by Olga Rudge, Pound’s intimate companion for from the late 1930s on, with her note clipped to the dust-jacket *page 103: Dr. Buckminster Fuller with Ezra Pound;*her presentation note and several explanatory notes loosely inserted: With love from O.R. (in memory of the meeting of Buckminster Fuller, Isamu Noguchi, Ezra Pound at the Cini Foundation 1970); For the DANTE Commemoration 1955three (3) speakers were invited: T.S. Eliot (whose death intervened, his tribute was read by Prof. V Branca), Eugenio Montale and Ezra Pound (who spoke ofT.S.E. and Dante, & English translations of the poet)A large public was present at San Giorgio for the commemoration. Also inserted is a copy of a three-page printed list of contributors to Testi- monianze A San Giorgioi, annotated by Rudge: List of people whose testimonies to the importance of the San Giorgio Foundation, Venice, are printed in the volume commemorating its 20th year, 1971. Above volume includes a photograph of Dr. Buckminster Fuller with Ezra Pound (103) see next page of this Xerox [where Pound’s name appears on the list]. The slipcase is addressed to Fuller in Carbondale, and gives a San Gregorio, D.D. address for Rudge in Venice. The typescript carbon acknowledgement by Fuller’s secretary.
¶ (Literature) Rosenberg, Samuel. Naked is THE Best Disguise. The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., (1974). 8vo.; brown half cloth; dust-jacket; slightly browned and rubbed; library label on spine.
First edition of Rosenberg’s best-known work, in which he “traces Sherlock Holmes’s origins to Nietzsche, Melville, Poe, Bunyan, Boccacio, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Wilde and others. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For you, Bucky, in gratitude for your great gift of friendship; you were the first to recognize and encourage me, and to give me your immense intellectual support. Sam Rosenberg Aug 1974. Fuller penned the blurb on the lower panel. One Fuller scholar refers to Rosenberg as “a photographer, author and raconteur who turned his vicarious reading habits, prodigious memory and hyperactive imagination into a subsidiary career as a literary psychosleuth.”
He started as a photographer and photo analyst for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later served as official photographer at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. He also wrote magazine articles, published essays and served as a Hollywood story consultant. His appetite for books was matched by his appetite. His 6-foot-3-inch, 300 pound frame prompted Bucky to describe his great friend as “history’s most massive reader”. Their friendship started in Washington in the 1940s and continued throughout their lives. Several widely used photographs of Bucky were Sam’s work. (“Synergetic Webbing,” curated by Tony Gwilliam of Tenseg- rity International, Inc., Ojai, with the assistance of Allegra Fuller Snyder)
THE EARLIEST FULLER SIGNATURE IN THE LIBRARY
¶ (Literature) Wells, H.G. The Outline OF History. Being a plain history of life and mankind. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
Large 8vo.; illustrated; light foxing to preliminaries; hinges tender; cloth; rubbed; edgeworn; extremities chipped.
Third edition, “revised and rearranged by the author.” Signed on the front endpaper in an early hand by a 26 year old Fuller, then still using his first name: Richard Buckminster Fuller 1921. More than one critic has noted Fuller’s affinity with Wells, and his combination of his study of the history of science and mathematics with a predilection for sciencefiction. Though Wells is most commonly remembered for his many science-romances that are still read today, he began his writing career with a strong scientific background and which he applied to his fiction and non-fiction alike. He had an active political career, and wrote to one friend of his belief that there was “something other than either story-writing or artistic merit which has emerged” in his fiction, “Something one might regard as a new system of ideas ‘thought’ ” (quoted in Lovat Dickson, H.G. Wells, NY: MacMillan. 1969, p. 79). This “new system of ideas” is clearly evinced in his non-fiction, as well, in books such as The Outline of History and The New World Order (see next entry), both considered classics by futurists world wide.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY’S COPY
¶ (Literature) Wells, H.G. The New World Order. Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be. New York: Knopf, 1940.
8vo.; cloth; extremities frayed; spine darkened.
First American edition. Christopher Morley’s copy, with his signature dated February 14, 1940 on the front endpaper; presumably gifted to Fuller, with his signature beneath, dated March 1940.
¶ (Literature) Wescott, Glenway. The GRANDMOTHERS. A Family Portrait. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
8vo.; printed wrappers; spine sunned.
First Atheneum edition of this novel first published in 1927. A presentation copy, inscribed inside the front cover: For R. Buckminster Fuller, with the friendship first formed in our early years in Greenwich Village, and admiration constantly increasing in the course of his career of creative building, Glenway W
¶ (Literature) Williams, Jonathan. Jargon 30: Jonathan Williams Poems 1956, 1957. Drawings, collages, Fielding Dawson. Highlands: [Jargon Books], (1959).
8vo.; black and white collages and drawings; stiff wrappers; dust-jacket affixed; closed tear to top edge. First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Mr. and Mrs. Fuller with regard Jonathan Williams Carbondale 1961. Williams founded the Jargon Press in the spring of 1951, just before his arrival at the Black Mountain summer session at which Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Ben Shahn were teaching. He could be found at Black Mountain off-and-on from 1951 until its doors closed in 1956. There he developed the limited knowledge of printing he had acquired at the University of Chicago into a small press, publishing small editions of work by Black Mountain writers and artists, including Fuller.
¶ (Literature) Wilson, Thomas J. American Book PUBLISHING: HAZARDS AND Opportunities.
A special reprint from the Winter 1963 Issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for the Club of Odd Volumes 1963. 8vo.; printed wrappers; stapled; sunned and slightly discolored; library label on cover.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front cover: To Bucky Fullerin the hope that he will write more and still more effectively about the evils of non-books and grand pianos. TJW.
¶ Lyman, Christopher M. The VANISHING Race AND OTHER ILLUSIONS. Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. Introduction by Vine Deloria, Jr. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, (1982).
Oblong 8vo.; title page creased; black and white photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; light edgewear; spine sunned; library label on spine.
First edition of this book Lyman published after working first as a photo researcher on the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians, then as curator; issued in conjunction with “The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: A New Look at the Work of Edward Curtis,” a traveling exhibition presented by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. After its publication, Lyman began spending more time among Fuller’s beloved islands in Penobscot Bay, dividing his years between Barred Island or Eagle Island and New York. He recently noted, “Though I no longer live year-round on the Islands, they and the communities they support remain a huge part of my life” (exhibition, “Photographs of Stones”).
Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper.
¶ (Political Science) Markley, Congressman Ed with Douglas Waller. Nuclear Peril. The Politics of Proliferation. Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing Company, (1982).
8vo.; grey cloth; dust-jacket; very slightly edgeworn.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Dec 16, 1982 Bucky, If I had my way, every senator would be strapped to a chair and made to listen to you for a hour. It would make a real difference in the way the world is governed. Ed. With an additional inscription, with an illegible signature below: Happy and honored to be here for this little ceremony.
¶ (Mathematics) Dantzig, Tobias. Number: The Language of Science. A critical survey written for the cultured non-mathematician. New York: Macmillan, 1935. 8vo.; illustrated; endpapers lightly browned; cloth; extremities frayed; spine darkened.
Second edition, revised. With Fuller’s note on the front endpaper: R. Buckminsters Book loaned to C. Morley as a hostage for the History of the Alphabet.
¶ (Mathematics) Schlossberg, Edwin. Einstein and Beckett. A Record of an Imaginary Discussion with Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett. Foreword by John Un- terecker. New York: Links (Books), (1973).
8vo.; grey cloth; dust-jacket slightly browned and edgeworn; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Oct. 29–1973 For Ann & Bucky with love Edwin Schlossberg. A Fuller Institute scholar writes that despite the half century age difference, mutual admiration and affection sprung up between them instantly as they recognized a shared vision. “In the early months of their friendship, when Schlossberg was twenty-four and a doctoral candidate in physics and literature [at SIU], Bucky had found himself irked “miffed” is the word he usesat the letters Schlossberg wrote him. Eddie’s words and thoughts so closely resembled Bucky’s own that the younger man seemed to be aping the older. But after a while Bucky realized it was simply that they were so much alike that thinking and talking in a Fulleresque way came naturally to Schlossberg.” In 1969 the two conducted the first World Game Seminar. Fuller surely appreciated Schlossberg’s publication of this take on Einstein, a key influence in his work and life.
¶ (Mathematics) Schlossberg, Edwin and John Brockman. The Pocket CALCULATOR Game Book. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975.
8vo.; printed wrappers; library label on spine.
First edition, later printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: For Bucky I Neuer has my faith in humanity found so wonderful a proponent LoveEd Schlossberg.
¶ (Mathematics) Ghyka, Matila. The Geometry OF Art AND Life. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946.
8vo.; cloth; spine sunned; half-circle sticker on spine; light wear to extremities.
First edition. Signed Fuller on the front endpaper, R. Buckminster Fuller, dated June 31, 1950, and with his Forest Hills, New York address noted.
¶ (Mathematics) Kenner, Hugh. GEODESIC Math AND How TO Use IT. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press, 1976).
8vo.; cloth; library label on spine.
First edition of Kenner’s second work devoted to Fuller; Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller had come out three years earlier. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: For Bucky, who’s been everywhere first, and whose synergetic whale-crocodile-earth gives the warrant both for non-spherical geodesics and for the conceptual system by which they are calculated here. Affectionately, Hugh Kenner / Baltimore / August 20,1976.
This inscription might seem hyperbolic, but Kenner, best-known for his studies in literary modernismhis biography of Pound, and his work on Joyce, Beckett, Lewis, and Eliothas Fuller to thank for discovering a useful way to examine his subject. Though Fuller had been a faint but persistent blip on his radar screen since the mid 1940s, Kenner did not encounter him in the flesh until a 1967 lecture. “His talk saved for me, that week, a book called The Pound Era I had been trying to think out for years and was suddenly able to start writing,” Kenner writes in the first chapter of Bucky…. “Since then, on five years’ acquaintance, I have found him continually interesting, without feeling I needed to choose among several ways of being interested.”
I don’t attempt a “life.” The documents are so copious the biographer will be years absorbing them. I’ll try to give a sense of the man his own books may obscure that will include some hints at him limitationsand a guide to the system of coherencies he’s given us for our space-age navigating. A guide, not an outline. It’s a poet’s job he does, clarifying the world. That’s the emphasis I understand best. Should we muff our part of the world’s work irretrievably a possibility he does not ignore, though his optimism is famousthen it will have been Fuller’s achievement anyhow to show a vision of what might have been. (pp. 11–12)
From Chris Morley
¶ (Mathematics) McKay, Herbert. Odd Numbers; or, Arithmetic Revisited . Cambridge and New York: The University Press and Macmillan, 1943.
8vo.; book mark staining to front endpapers (book mark loosely inserted); cloth.
First edition. A gift to Fuller from Christopher Morley, inscribed on the front endpaper: R.B.F. in honor of his rebuilding the sphere (on a system of 8’s) 27 August 1943 from C.M.
¶ McLuhan, Marshall. The GUTENBERG Galaxy. The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, (1962).
8vo.; cloth; spine sunned; dust-jacket; rubbed; edgeworn; spine sunned; round sticker on spine.
First edition, second printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For the glorious Bucky who provides us all with a foretaste of the extension of consciousness that is near in this Electric Age. In friendship and esteem, Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan and Fuller first met on a Doxiadis Delos Symposium cruise in the early 1960s, by which time McLuhan was a convert to Fuller’s ideals. Fuller writes in Synergetic Dictionary of that meeting: McLuhan “held up copies of No More Secondhand God and Nine Chains to the Moon and said to me ‘I’ve joined your conspiracy.’ ” According to a member of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, McLuhan “called Bucky ‘the Leonardo da Vinci of our times.’ ” Bucky continues, “McLuhan felt that there were many things being written of great cogency but which society were missing altogether. This is the source of the missionary zeal and fervor.” Given the date of this publicationit is not unlikely that this inscription was made at the end of that conference or shortly thereafter, in commemoration of it.
¶ (McLuhan, Marshall) McLuhan Hot & COOL. A primer for the understanding of a critical symposium with a rebuttal by McLuhan. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. New York: The Dial Press, 1967.
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; spine sunned; lightly used.
First edition of this anthology printing essays by Tom Wolfe, Frank Kermode, A. Alvarez, Harold Rosenberg, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, and several others, with responses by McLuhan.
¶ Menninger, Karl, with Martin Mayman and Paul Pruyser. The Vital Balance. The life process in mental health and illness. New York: Viking, (1965).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; edgeworn; few nicks; round sticker on spine.
First edition, fifth printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For a man whose brilliant ideas have long inspired us & whom we now meet again, with hopes of closer association Buckminster Fuller from Jean & Karl Menninger 4.14.66.
¶ Menninger, Karl M.D. The Crime of PUNISHMENT. The Isaac Ray Award Book. New York: The Viking Press, (1968).
8vo.; black cloth; dust-jacket; top edge worn; spine sunned; library label on spine.
First edition of Menninger’s exposition of “the crime of punishment” that it in fact aggravates crime, and is therefore self-defeatingand his presentation of a rational solution: “he would strengthen the arm of the police, but not with guns. He would replace punitive vengeance with scientific assessment. On the basis of such assessment, many useful devices could be employed for effective rehabilitation. Failing rehabilitation, permanent detention or other controls should be made certain” (dust-jacket).
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky & Anne Fuller a Merry Christmas Karl Menningen ’68.
¶ Nelson, George. On Design. New York and London: Whitney Library of Design / Watson-Guptill Publications and The Architectural Press, (1979).
8vo.; 100 black and white photographs; cloth; dust-jacket; edges lightly scuffed; library label on spine.
First edition. Signed on the front endpaper, Buckminster Fuller.
Though trained as an architect, Nelson (1908-1986) saw his greatest impact in furniture designer. As an editor of Architectural Forum during the 1930s, he championed the newly developing style of organic furniture design. Eventually his writing earned him the attention of one of the major players in modern furniture, Herman Miller, who hired him to develop a new line. Nelson’s designs achieved critical and commercial success, and contributed to the momentum of the early work of Charles and Ray Eames as well as the early designs of Knoll. Later in his career Nelson proselytized for modern design in Tomorrow’s House (1945), Problems of Design (1977), and On Design (1979), all classics in their field.
¶ (New York) Silver, Nathan. Lost New York. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
8vo.; black and white photographs; cloth; extremities gently bumped; photographic dust-jacket; edge- worn with a few nicks.
First edition. Signed by Fuller on the front endpaper.
¶ North, Arthur E. Pneumatic Structures. An experimental study of the deformation of pneumatic-rib hatches under load conditions and the formulation of a design hypothesis. North London: The Polytechnic of North London, November 1973.
8vo.; wrappers, tape spine; front panel detached; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To R. Buckminster Fullerwith appreciation and affection. Arthur North I London I January 1975. With Fuller’s notes: See 8/18; See pneumatic structures Dymaxion World ofB.F. On pages 17–18 North writes: “Experience in geodesic design suggests that the application of pneumatic ribs to a geodesic structural design would combine the efficient stress resolution of the geodesic form with the advantage of pneumatic structures which have already been described. It has been found, in fact, since commencing this study, that R. Buckminster Fuller (USA) has anticipated this concept by constructing an experimental structure of this type, but has not published design or performance data.”
¶ Pell, Senator Claiborne. MEGALOPOLIS UNBOUND. The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, (1966).
8vo.; illustrated wrappers; rubbed; some wear to spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Buckminster Fuller With my real admiration and regard Claiborne Pell.
¶ (Penn, Arthur) Wood, Robin. ARTHUR Penn. (London): Studio Vista, (1967).
8vo.; black and white film stills; printed wrapper; rebound in tan cloth; library label on spine.
First edition; rebound. A presentation copy, inscribed by the subject on the front endpaper of the new binding: Bucky, Many thanks, dear friend, for the pleasure of knowing you. Arthur. With Penn’s address taped to front endpaper. Fuller met Penn during the now legendary 1948 summer session at Black Mountain College. Penn directed Fuller in a play that season, and helped him to develop the “performance” style for which he became known throughout his career as a worldwide lecturer and global personality.
But by the time they met, Fuller already had a unique flair. Penn “spoke of Bucky’s vision as ‘practically palpable’ but ‘not one I could reproduce even for a minute…just absolutely extraordinary’ ” (Hatch, p. 189).
¶ (Philosophy) The I CHING OR BOOK OF Changes. The Richard Wilhelm Translation. Rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Foreword by C.G. Jung. (London): Routledge & Kegan Paul, (1960).
2 vols., 8vo.; discrete book store label on front pastedown; cloth; dust-jacket; spines sunned; wear to edges; few chips.
Second edition, a reprint from the 1951 first edition. A gift copy, each inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky Fuller with highest respect Keith Critchow 1963; and, To Bucky Fuller with highest regard Keith Critchlow 1963.
¶ (Philosophy) Krishnamurti, J. Think ON THESE THINGS. Edited by D. Rajagopal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
8vo.; bookstore label on front pastedown; green half cloth; dust-jacket; spine browned; extremities lightly chipped; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Dr. Fuller With much affection J. Krishnamurti. Fuller noted on the cover, above the author’s printed name: Signed copy by.
¶ Piel, Gerard. SCIENCE IN THE CAUSE OF Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
8vo.; orange and black cloth; dust-jacket; some wear to extremities.
Second edition, revised and enlarged. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bucky Fuller in admiration, affection and in debt for so much taught by example as well as by precept 5121163 Gerry Piel.
¶ 186 *Planck,Dr.Max.The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics. London: Unwin, (1937).
8vo.; cloth.
Second edition. A presentation copy, inscribed: To R. Buckminster Fuller. August 1950.
¶ Plunz, Richard, ed. Mantua PRIMER: Toward A Program FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, (1970).
Oblong 8vo.; illustrated; wrappers; spine and edges scuffed; round sticker on spine.
First edition of this survey of the Mantua section of West Philadelphia, “prepared under the direction of Richard Plunz, assistant profession of architecture, by” eight student architects, coordinated by Edward Jakmauh, and sponsored by Penn State’s Department of Architecture, College of Arts and Architecture.
¶ (Political Science) Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. FEDERALISM AND THE FRENCH Canadians. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1968.
8vo.; pages browned; printed wrappers; light wear; partial library label on spine.
First English-language edition, third printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: Inscribed for Mr. Buckminster Fuller, with respect and regards E. Trudeau. Fuller noted on the cover: This is a signed copy, and added an arrow pointing to the author’s name.
INSCRIBED BY FERDINAND MARCOS
¶ (Political Science) Marcos, Ferdinand E. The DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION IN the Philippines. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall International, (1974).
8vo.; blue morocco; dust-jacket; slight shelf wear; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: October 1976 To Dr.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Best wishesFerdinand Marcos.
SIGNED BY ADLAI STEVENSON
¶ (Political Science) Stevenson, Adlai. LOOKING OUTWARD. Years of Crisis at the United Nations. Edited, with commentary, by Robert L. and Selma Schiffer. Preface by John F. Kennedy. New York: Harper & Row, (1963).
8vo.; blue cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed; light edgewear.
First edition of this collection of speeches and papers. A gift copy inscribed in an unknown hand on the front endpaper, To Buckminster Fuller, previously signed by Stevenson in full on the same page.
¶ (Reference) The American College Dictionary. Clarence L. Barnhart, Ed- itor-in-Chief; Jess Stein, Managing Editor. Assisted and advised by 355 authorities and specialists. New York: Random House, (1953).
Large 8vo.; cloth; lightly used; library label on spine.
Signed on the front endpaper by Fuller.
¶ (Reference) Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945. A supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States prepared by the Bureau of the Census with the cooperation of the Social Science Research Council. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949.
4to.; pictorially stamped cloth; darkened.
First edition; three page errata list loosely inserted. Signed by Fuller and dated May 31, 1950 on the front endpaper, where an additional errata list and explanation of edition revisions is taped.
¶ (Reference) Bartlett, John. Familiar Quotations. Christopher Morley, Editor. Louella D. Everett, Associate Editor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948.
Large 8vo.; cloth; spine faded; light wear to extremities.
Twelfth edition, edited by Fuller’s friend Christopher Morley; revised and enlarged edition of this “collection of passages, phrases and proverbs, traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature by John Bartlett. Signed on the front endpaper, R. Buckminster Fuller at Chicago Institute of Design Dec. 4-1948, with a few marginal lines within the Kipling quotation. Fuller is quoted on page 996:
We must think of our whole economics in terms of a preventive pathology instead of a curative pathology.
Don’t oppose forces; use them.
God is a verb,
Not a noun. No more Secondhand God.
¶ (Religion) Marty, Martin E. A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. New York: Meridian Books, (1963).
8vo.; printed wrappers; slightly rubbed; spine creased; library label on spine.
First edition, fifth printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: To Buckminster Fuller Marty Marty After pleasant days at Augustana 1965.
¶ (Religion) Sister Corita. Footnotes and Headlines. Aplay-pray book. (New York): Herder and Herder, (1967).
8vo.; color illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; light wear to extremities; rear flap torn and repaired with tape; slightly faded.
First edition of what Marshall McLuhan called “a new form of book …an ex-ray of human thought and social situations” (dust-jacket); foreword by Daniel Berrigan. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For Buckminster & Anneyou are more beautiful than millions of bubbleswe all thank you for beinglove, Corita.
¶ (Religion) Rumi. Rumi: Poet and Mystic. (1207–1273) Selections from his writings translated from the Persian with introduction and notes by the late Reymold A. Nicholson. London: George Allen and Unwin, (1968).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed.
First edition, fourth printing; first published in 1950. Number One of Unwin’s Ethical and Religious Classics of the East and West series. A gift, inscribed on the front endpaper with a poem:
Through divine grace there appears in the darken hall a light
The chain of transmission or primordial truths knows no bounds the novice is willing to see.
[signature] Sept 1970 Isphahan
[signature] Ardalan.
With Fuller’s note, Given to B.F. by Professor Ardalan at Isphahan. Sept 1970. Buckminster Fuller. With his underlining and marginal lines to the sixth poem, “The Grief of the Dead,” and his meteorological drawing on the rear endpaper.
¶ Roland, Conrad. Frei Otto SPANNWEITEN. Ideen und Versuche zum Leicht- bau. Berlin / Frankfurt: Ullstein / Main Wien, (1965).
Oblong 8vo.; block and white photographs and illustrations; cloth; dust-jacket; edgeworn; several chips and closed tears.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: I think that I know how difficult vour way was / in admiration I cordially yours Frei Otto.
¶ Safdie, Moshe. Beyond HABITAT. Edited by John Kettle. Montreal: Tundra Books, 1970.
8vo.; 55 black and white photographs; cloth; photographic dust-jacket; round sticker on spine, light edgewear.
First edition of Safdie’s second book, a defense of his most influential design, the Habitat housing project built for the 1967 Montreal exposition to show that “a humane environment with a high level of amenities could be achieved in a high density, multi-level urban context,” and that “industrialized, repetitive mass production methods could be used to make housing construction more efficient without the associated stereotyped, monotonous and scale-less environment. Habitat ‘67 demonstrated that a rich and varied environment is possible within the disciplined industrialized system.’’ Other projects of note include several buildings in Jerusalem, the city of his birth, as well as Exploration place in Wichita, Kansas.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky with admiration & much affection. Moshe Safdie. Montreal Feb 1/1971.
¶ Safdie, Moshe. Form & Purpose: Is the Emperor Naked? Edited by John Kettle. Aspen: International Design Education Foundation, 1980.
8vo.; black and while photographs; wrappers; edges lightly scuffed.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: To Bucky with admiration appreciation and affection Moshe Aspen June 15, 1980.
¶ Salk, Jonas. Man UNFOLDING. New York: Harper & Row, (1972).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket.
First edition of the first book by Salk (1915-1995), who developed the first polio vaccine. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Bucky Fuller who comprehends the comprehensivewith affection Jonas Salk.
When news of the discovery of the Salk vaccine for polio, and its success, was made public on April 12,1955, Fuller was deeply affected by the news. Perhaps even more sensitive than most, because his own first daughter had been afflicted with polio and died from the complications, Fuller saw in Salk the essence of the individual who could change the quality of life for all humanity. On their first meeting, Fuller’s immediate response to Salk was one of deep admiration and respect. In 1956 he dedicated a poem to Salk, and the two met regularly at Doxiadis’s floating Delos symposia in the mid-1960s. In 1972 Salk became a founding member of the Design Science Institute.
In 1963 Salk founded the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, an innovative center for medical and scientific research designed by Louis Kahn in La Jolla, California. He had hoped that he would also be able to found a parallel Jonas Salk Institute for the Humanities, next to it, comprising the archives of Fuller, Doxiadis, and Marshall McLuhan. He was in discussion with Allegra Fuller Snyder about this dream in 1984 when his concerns where drawn to the need for an AIDS cure, at which he was engaged when he died.
¶ Salk, Jonas. SURVIVAL OF THE WISEST. New York: Harper & Row, (1973).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket.
First edition of Salk’s second book. A presentation copy, inscribed: For Bucky Fuller who is what this book is all about. Jonas Salk.
¶ Salk, Jonas. Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason. Convergence: Founded, planned, and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket; spine sunned; library label on spine.
First edition of Salk’s final work. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky with love, Jonas Salk, and signed Buckminster Fuller 4/10/83.
¶ (South Africa) White, Professor L.W. Thornton. A MASTER Plan FOR PORT Louis Mauritius. A report. Cape Town: Thornton White, Pryce Lewis & Sturrock, Architects & Town Planning Consultants, December 1952.
8vo.; 5 fold-out plans; endpapers browned; cloth.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front pastedown: To R. Buckminster Fuller with regards from the author L. W. Thornton White Cape Town May 1958. With a 6 ? x 8 ? inch leaf loosely inserted bearing High Floyd’s drawings of “Buckminster Fuller demonstrating the flight of a heavy duck,” signed Hugh Floyd Cape Town 1958.
¶ (Space Science) (NASA). Earth Photographs from Gemini III, IV, and V. Washington, DC: NASA, Scientific and Technical Information Division, Office of Technology Utilization, 1967.
4to.; color plates; cloth; library label on spine.
First edition. Inscribed on the front endpaper by someone named “Tom”: Best regards to Bucky Fuller. .. .
¶ (Space Science) (NASA) Nicks, Oran W., ed. This Island Earth. Washington, DC: NASA, Scientific and Technical Information Division, Office of Technology Utilization, 1970.
4to.; color photographs; title page rubbed; cloth; library label on spine.
First edition. A gift copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Bucky Fuller with admiration Norman Mayer. With Fuller’s signature and explanatory note: Norman Mayer director of advanced structures research for N.A.S.A. It was Norman who brought me to his NASA operation as an advanced structures consultant. BF.
¶ (Space Science) Ruzic, Neil. WHERE THE Winds Sleep. Man’s Future on the Moon: A Projected History. With a foreword by Wernher von Braun and illustrations by Donald G. Lewis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1970.
8vo.; black cloth; dust-jacket; rubbed and slightly edgeworn.
First edition of Ruzic’s “history” of man’s colonization of the moon from 1975 to 2045. Rather than a science fiction novel, Ruzic presents “extrapolated science; based on the most current programs of NASA, it is a true projection of what we can expect from our life on this other world: the economic advantages of manufacturing and mining; the ability to do scientific research impossible on earth; the use of the moon as an astronomical observatory and as a stepping stone to the planets.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half title: To: Buckminster Fuller, with best wishes for the future, Neil Ruzic. With a typed letter carbon from Fuller’s secretary acknowledging the gift.
¶ (Space Science) O’Neill, Gerard K. The High FRONTIER. Human Colonies in Space. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1977.
8vo.; 24 black and white illustrations; blue half cloth; dust-jacket; library label on spine.
First edition, fifth printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: With very best wishes to Bucky Fidler, in the pleasant recollection of a wonderful day of conversation, and in the anticipation that by joint effort these visions will be realized. Gerard O’Neill Princeton 1218177.
¶ Struik, Dirk J. Yankee Science in the Making. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948. 8vo.; discreet book store label on front endpaper; black cloth; light wear; library label on spine.
First edition. A gift from his daughter, signed by Fuller on the front endpaper R. Buckminster Fuller / Christmas 1948 I from [in her hand] xxxx Allegra. With wrapping paper fragments and a ribbon bow affixed to the front pastedown.
¶ (Thompson, James H.W.) Nimboonchaj, Niphon, photos. 6 Soi KASEMSAN II. An illustrated survey of the Bangkok home of James H.W. Thompson. (Bangkok: Siva Phorn), 1962.
8vo.; full page black and white plates; hinge completely cracked between title page and first plate; three- quarter morocco; library label on spine.
Second edition, revised from the 1959 first edition; deluxe issue, limited to 100 numbered copies printed on heavy art paper and fully lacquered (this is copy #98). Signed at the colophon by James Thompson, and Niphon Nimboonchaj, as called for. With Fuller’s ownership signature at the top of that page.
Thompson’s early architectural career is often overlooked by those interested in his entrepreneurial work in Thailand, where he quite literally paved the way for international tourists and businessman through his development of the local tourist industry along with his trade in oriental textiles through the company he founded in 1942, the Jim Thompson Thai Silk Company. Nevertheless, he began life as Princeton graduate with artistic leanings and an architecture degree from U Penn, and practiced his trade until 1940, when war-time duties took over. It is likely that Fuller, as an international figure of some stature, met Thompson on one of his visits to Thailand; presumably in 1962, the year this book was published. His mysterious disappearance just a few years later, in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, was never solved, but by then he had earned the sobriquet, the “Legendary American of Thailand,” as well as the Order of the White Elephant, an honor reserved for foreigners who perform high service in Thai interest.
¶ Thorsteinn, Einar. Catastrophe Safe Housing. A proposal for a preventive catastrophe housing. Reykjavik: Life after Birth, (1981).
Oblong 8vo.; illustrated; wrappers, tape spine.
First edition of this report completed in 1980-81 at the Institute for Lightweight Structures, University of Stuttgart (Director Frei Otto), under the auspices of DAAD in Bonn, West Germany. A presentation copy, inscribed on the cover: My friend Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller lovingly Einar.
¶ Thorsteinn, Einar. TRIANGULAR FACES GEODESIC FREQUENCY. Completed at II Stuttgart, September 1981. Reykjavik, Iceland: Life After Birth, 1981.
Oblong 8vo.; 27 pages; wrappers; stapled; tape spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the cover: To Bucky with love Einar.
¶ Tomkins, Calvin. The Lewis and Clark Trail. Introduction by Stewart L.
Udall. New York: Harper and Row, (1965).
8vo.; illustrated; cloth; edges sunned; dust-jacket; wear to extremities.
First edition. A gift, inscribed by a Fuller relation on the half-title: R. Buckminster Fuller Christmas 1965 from Rosy Fuller Kenison.
Fuller’s sister Rosy Fuller Kenison was a Sneed’s Landing neighbor of Calvin Tomkins; it is she who introduced Fuller to Tomkins, who spent several weeks at Bear Island working on his extensive New Yorker profile which raised Fuller’s public presence significantly (January 8, 1966).
¶ Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980.
8vo.; cloth; light wear; dust-jacket; heavily worn; rear flap loosely inserted.
First edition of Tomkins’s best-known work. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Dear Bucky & AnneNothing in this will be unfamiliar to you, and certainly not the plot. It’s all part of your biography With great affection, Cal Tomkins, Aug. 1980. Tomkins wrote the first significant in-depth profile of Fuller; for The New Yorker, in 1966.
¶ (Vilayat, Pir and Inayat Khan) Sufi Order. Toward THE One. New York: Harper Sc Row, (1974).
8vo.; illustrated; promotion fold-out poster affixed inside rear wrapper; wrappers; spine sunned; abrasion to spine; library label on spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank: To a revised & distinguishable friend /pioneer of new age thinking which is his.
¶ Ward, Barbara. SPACESHIP Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
8vo.; cloth; library label on spine; price-clipped dust-jacket; light wear to extremities; abrasion to front flap removing some text; library label on spine.
First edition of Ward’s George B. Pegram lectures; with an article on Ward from The Environmentalist taped to the front endpaper. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To my esteemed & beloved friend Buckminster Fuller who provided much more than the title of this book. Barbara Ward Jackson May 23rd 1966. With Fuller’s lengthy note on page 15, where he underlined Ward’s comment that she derived her book title from his comparison. Apparently, Fuller hoped for a more specific acknowledgement of his influence: Barbara insists that she said clearly in this book that she had taken its name from me having heard me give the title spaceship to our place 8 in one of my lectures on the Dinos Doxiades []. I would not say that she had made a clear declaration of the writing of the name she has borrowed for this book. See also dedication she acknowledged me but not to the public. B Fuller. In the prefacethere is no dedication per sehe underlined the relevant text in the final sentence, in which his idea, but not his name, is mentioned: “Then, when the grosser inequalities have been remedied, there can be more hope of building the common institutions, policies, and beliefs which the crew of Spaceship Earth must acquire if they are to have any sure hope of survival.”
¶ Whyte, Lancelot Law, ed. ASPECTS OF Form. A symposium on form in nature and art. New York: Pellegrini 8c Cudahy, (1951).
8vo.; illustrated; cloth; rubbed; edgeworn; spine browned; round sticker on spine.
First edition.
¶ Whyte, Lancelot Law. ACCENT ON Form. An anticipation of the science of tomorrow. Planned and edited by Ruth Nanada Anshen. New York: Harper and Brothers, (1954).
8vo.; lower hinge cracked; cloth; bottom edge water damaged; extremities frayed.
First edition. Volume two in the World Perspectives series. Fuller’s annotated reading copy, with his signature, dated February 23, 1955, on the front endpaper, his notes filling the rear blank (which is partially affixed to the rear pastedown) and a few of the margins. In the rear Fuller drew a sphere and wrote beneath it, “I now know how to make a discontinuous double shell sphere of two sets of six st[ ].”
With a presentation copy of a Whyte pamphlet,“Unique Arrangements of Points on a Sphere”affixed to the front pastedown, inscribed: For Mr. R. Buckminster Fuller from a companion adventurer in spherical forms! Lance Whyte Febr. 1955.
¶ (Yoga) Satchidananda, Yogiraj Sri Swami. INTEGRAL Yoga Hatha. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, (1970).
4to.; black and white photographic illustrations; printed wrappers; slight shelf wear.
First edition. With a typed letter signed, “Peter Max,” on his letterhead, explaining: “It gives me great pleasure to share with you the great work of my beloved teacher…”
¶ Frequently Cited References
Baldwin, J. Bucky Works. Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today. New York… : Wiley, 1996.
Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. R. Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue / Scenario. Documented and edited by Robert Snyder. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
Critical Path. Adjuvant: Kiyoshi Kuromiya. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.
Hatch, Alden. Buckminster Fuller. At Home in the Universe. New York: Dell Publishing, 1974.
International Dictionary of American Architects (IDAA). New York: St. James Press, 1993.
Kenner, Hugh. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1973.
Seiden, Lloyd Steven. Buckminster Fuller’s Universe. An appreciation. Foreword by Norman Cousins. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1989.
SET IN SABON AND FUTURA TYPES. DESIGN & TYPOGRAPHY BY JERRY KELLY
¶ Catalog Prices
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152 EAST 74 STREET NEW YORK CITY 1002–1
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¶ Index
¶ Bibliography
Adler, Alfred. 1927. Understanding Human Nature. New York: Greenberg.
AE. 1982. The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. Vol. 2. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Agassiz, Louis, Guy Davenport, Alfred Sherwood Romer, Guy Davenport, and Jonathan Williams. n.d. The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings.
Albers, Anni. 1959. On Designing. New Haven: Pellango Press.
———. 1980. Anni Albers: Prints and Drawings ; Riverside: University Art Gallery, University of California.
Albers, Josef. 1963. Interaction of Color. New Haven and: Yale University Press.
Aronin, Jeffrey Ellis. 1979. Climate & Architecture. 1st AMS ed. New York: AMS Press.
Banham, Reyner. 1966. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? London: Architectural P.
———. 1969. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. London: Architectural P.
———. 1971. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. London: Allen Lane.
Bohm, Victor. 1969. Cubes and Man: A Psychological View of Architecture. New York: Psychological Library Pub.
Breuer, Marcel, and Tician Papachristou. 1970. Marcel Breuer, New Buildings and Projects. New York: Praeger.
Conrads, Ulrich, and Hans Günther Sperlich. 1962. The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times. New York: Praeger.
Corbusier, Le. 1927. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Payson & Clarke, ltd.
Leakey, Richard E, and Roger Lewin. 1977. Origins: What New Discoveries Reveal about the Emergence of Our Species and Its Possible Future. London: Macdonald; Janea’s.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Basic Books. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0832/00268383-b.html.
———. 1966. The Savage Mind: (La Pensée Sauvage). The Nature of Human Society Series. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.