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69.
Inflatocookbook: A Pneu-Age Techs Book.
Sausalito, CA: Ant Farm Inc., late 1970/early 1971. First edition. 4to. Unpaginated. A hand-made volume consisting of 30 loose-leaf sheets (11 A3 folded, 18 A4, 1 A5), all except three of them double-sided, inserted into a transparent vinyl jacket. Printed by the Rip Off Press in San Francisco, with title on the cover sheet rubber stamped by hand. Written, designed "compiled and published November 10, 1970 to December 10, 1970" by Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez, among others, and originally sold via mail order in a limited edition of 2000 copies.
The Ant Farm collective's DIY architecture manual was intended as an educational tool to communicate a basic methodology for creating environmentally friendly shelter, created in the spirit of Steve Baer's 'Dome Cookbook', Don Lancaster's 1968 'RTL Cookbook' (a manual on low-cost digital integrated circuits), and Stewart Brand and Jay Baldwin's Whole Earth Catalog (with whom they later worked when building the fifty-by-fifty-foot Pillow in the Saline Valley, California).
Described as "our attempt to gather information and skills learned in process and organize it for easy access", the book provides advice and how-to information ('recipes') for creating pneumatic structures, some large enough for human occupation, with additional philosophical and conceptual statements on experimental architecture and a few references to their other non-inflatable projects.
The information, which includes specific technical and material specifications, is conveyed using a diverse and unconventional combination of text, drawings and photographs (composed, like the Whole Earth Catalog, on an IBM Selectric), some printed in colour, using graphic overlaying, cut-and-paste and collage. Sections include the Truckin' University, Idea Plumbing, Good Taste Pneumatics, Hy-Tek, Rasberry Exercises, and the World's Largest Snake, a giant phallus-shaped inflatable media centre in psychedelic colour. The loose-leaf format was chosen so that updates could be inserted (much like the WEC Supplements), with readers encouraged to offer 'feedback' for future editions (one sheet promises a second issue in Spring 1971, though this never materialised; a second, staple-bound edition appeared in 1973, printed in b/w only and with some material omitted).
Collation of individual copies seems to vary, with this copy being at least as complete as the few comparable examples found online in institutional holdings (most copies held are second editions). In 'Ant Farm 1968-1978' (item #193, p.17), Caroline Maniaque describes the first edition as containing 22 sheets, significantly fewer than the number present in this copy, but since the book was being written while simultaneously distributed, some variation was probably inevitable.
A little light soiling to plastic jacket; the glossy paper 'Truckstop' sheet has a 5cm. top corner crease; o/w Very Good plus. A rare copy of this radical underground publication, an avant-garde artists' book that, along with Steve Baer's 'Dome Cookbook', Lloyd Kahn's 'Domebook One', and Sim Van der Ryn's 'Farrallones Scrapbook', ranks as one of the era's primary 'how-to' countercultural manuals.
