Beschreibung:

Two Books on "Spaceship Earth" Author: Place: Publisher: Date: 1966-1969 Description: Two volumes: Ward, Barbara. Spaceship Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. 152 pp. Original cloth in dust jacket (price-clipped, rear panel soiled). 2nd Printing. Inscribed by Ward on flyleaf “with love and grateful memories. Barbara” Fuller, Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. 143 pp. Cloth and patterned boards, in price-clipped dust jacket. First Edition. These books attest to a 1960s obsession with the dawning Space Age so universal that it provided a perfect metaphor for burgeoning globalism. Ward pictured the earth, hurtling through space “on its journey through infinity”, having acquired “the intimacy, the fellowship, and the vulnerability” of a spaceship, encompassing a new interdependence of communication, transport, and economy which, in turn, demanded international cooperation to prevent nuclear destruction and halt the depletion of planetary resources. Reviewers of Fuller’s book, published six months before the Lunar Landing, credited him with popularizing the phrase “Spaceship Earth”, cleverly giving a technocratic façade to the image of our species as a space-voyaging crew, united by a shared fate. At a time when countdown and lift-off had become household words, Fuller thought this the “most intelligent metaphor for thinking about humankind on this planet…” Lot Amendments Condition: Very good. Item number: 319571