Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

Folio (273 × 356 mm). 62 ff. (126, 126A-D, 127, [1] pp., including binding). Original pictorial wrappers, bound tête bêche. First edition of Nelson’s cult manifesto for individual access to computers: here, an association copy inscribed on the upper wrapper to the computer historian Henry Tropp. Profusely illustrated with over 450 drawings, cartoons, and tables laid out in a collage-like manner that invites browsing and nonlinear reading, the book was conceived as two interlinked volumes with two front covers. It argues for the democratization of computing and rails against the concentration of knowledge in large institutions, explicitly urging readers that "you can and must understand computers now". - A pioneer of hypertext and hypermedia, Nelson (b. 1937) expands on those concepts here and introduces coinages such as "intertwingularity" and "fantics", anticipating the global networked information systems that would follow. The flipside, "Dream Machines: New Freedom through Computer Screens - a Minority Report", extends the argument into education and culture, advocating for the creative potential of interactive graphics and the newly emerging personal computer. - Long influential among designers and technologists, the work has been described as an underground bestseller of the microcomputer revolution. The first printing was self-funded and reportedly limited to only a few hundred copies, and signed examples of this issue are scarce. An important contemporary inscription to Tropp situates this copy within the earliest efforts to document the history and oral traditions of the field. - Well preserved with light foxing to edges and minor spotting to the Dream Machines wrapper. Wrappers slightly rubbed, otherwise a clean, very good copy. - Inscribed by the author in red marker on the upper wrapper for Henry S. Tropp (1927-2007), mathematician, computer historian and co creator of the Computer Oral History Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. The Henry S. Tropp papers are today stored at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. - Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (1985). Steven Levy, Hackers (1984).…