Blueprint for counter education

A$550 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Curriculum, handbook, wall decoration, shooting script. New York : Doubleday, 1970. First edition. Illustrated card box containing an unpaginated book and three large folding posters, 94 x 124 cm opened, complete. Designed by Marshall Henrichs. The original first edition of this icon of counterculture, the counter-university. This seminal work was reprinted in 2016, with the following description online: An unusual publication appeared in bookstores in the fall 1970, authored by the sociologist Maurice Stein and his collaborator Larry Miller. Published by Doubleday, its title was Blueprint for Counter Education: Curriculum – Handbook – Wall Decoration – Shooting Script. It assumed the form of a boxed set made up of three posters and an oversized paperback, whose wrappers proclaimed: “This counter-university makes obsolete the traditional university process … There is no text book, no final exam; and the ‘faculty’ includes Marcuse, McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jean-Luc Godard.” The base of the cover promised: The Revolution Starts Here. On the back of the box, the image of a clapperboard and television hovered above a granular black and white photograph of a student demonstration: a portrait of the publication’s intended audience. The revolution in question was at once a radical pedagogical experiment and a wholesale attempt to enact a visual turn in the organization of knowledge in the form of a “highly participative series of art-life games.” The posters, designed by the g

• Binding: Hardcover

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