Item #39228 A BOOK OF VISIONS: A DIRECTORY OF ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY PROJECTS, 1973.
A BOOK OF VISIONS: A DIRECTORY OF ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY PROJECTS, 1973.

127.

A BOOK OF VISIONS: A DIRECTORY OF ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY PROJECTS, 1973.

(London): The Ideas-Pool, July 1973. Tall 4to. Stapled wrps., 222pp. Cover illustration by Cliff Harper. Mimeographed on different colour papers.

Prints a selection of approximately 300 plans, ideas and projects entered over a four month period between January and April 1973 into 'The Alternative Society Ideas-Pool', created after an anonymous 'freak from Dublin' gave London BIT Information Service £1,250 to be spent on a useful alternative project. Nicholas Albery, the first secretary of the Commune Movement and publisher of BIT magazine, organised and ran what was billed as a 'Revolutionary Co-operative Competition', judged by an Ideas-Pool panel of 'attendants' comprising Richard Neville, Germaine Greer, Phil Cohen (of the London Street Commune), Nicholas Saunders, Jean Fraser (of U.P.S. and BIT) and John 'Hoppy' Hopkins.

The book arranges the entries, which range from the practical to the improbable, many of them destined never to be realised, into several categories. These include free schools; communes; unusual structures and living spaces (domes, eco-houses); ecology and alternative technology; travel and mobile projects; music and drama; media and information services; projects for the old, the lonely; local community projects and political campaigns; dope; alternative medical and mental health projects; sex, growth groups and free-for-alls; and religions and 'other freakishness'.

The myriad schemes and proposals entered include: the Old Node Dairy Organic Free School; Brighton Free School; Operation Octopus - Army Huts for mischievous kids; the Kingsway Community for people in distress and their new Cornwall farm; an empty Brunel-built Somerset Mushroom Farm; 'Seed' Country Commune Project; Rural Tribal Squat in a Deserted Village or Army Camp; Live-in-the-Sky Balloon-Sausages; Women's Commune, with computerised body suits, monitored by the community computer; Free Food Project outside Manchester; Help People in Trouble on the India Route; Mobile Fun Van plus lawyer, duplicator, video, buy/sell, freaks, music etc.; Man-Powered Planes For The Man-In-The-Street; Dorothy's Umbrella Art/Life Projects (John Furnival); Living Theatre London, revolutionary street group, lives communally; Greasy Truckers; Whole Earth Tools Publishers, useful books for living independently; Mass Anti-Capitalist Quiz With Prizes; The Cassette Gazette (Jim Haynes); The Women's Portable-Video Collective; Directory of Headshops/Communes' Produce etc.; Co-op & Mutual Aid Groups for Old People, Plus A Mag.; Birmingham: A House For Women's Liberation; The Homeless Action Campaign - Land For People Not Profit; 'London Belongs To Us' Rally; Buy Two Weights of Dope or Two of My Paintings; Research Into Neurosis-Avoiding Interior Design; A Commune For One Woman's Fight 'To Live True'; Fill A Place With Lemonade, Bongos, People, Cattle etc. & film the event; A Love House And Fucking School (Jim Haynes again); Findhorn Community, a bursary for visitors with no money; Om United New World Movement, nudist/orgone energy commune on the Norfolk coast; and Abolish Money, Have Time For Hobbies, Let Robots Work.

Staples slightly rusty; small mailing form clipped from penultimate page; o/w Very Good. 200 copies printed. A compendium of utopian ideas, offering a vivid insight into the radical free-thinking of the late-hippie era, and encapsulating a moment poised between the progressive hopes and visions of the 1960s and the reactionary neoliberalism that followed.

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