Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography

Devoting time to serious bibliographical matters as a tribute to Ted Nelson may seem like a quaintly out-of-tune and bookish, if not totally misguided project. It is easy to pigeon-hole Ted’s work as belonging to a generation of adventurous and creative writers and editors active during the 1960s who began to fi nd that traditional print media constrained the expression of their ideas. Marshall McLuhan and the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. Indeed, Literary Machines opens with the declaration that it is “a hypertext, or nonsequential piece of writing.” Each reader of this book has confronted the diffi culties imposed by non-linear writing on the linear medium of print. And yet, there is no way around the fact that most of Ted’s work has been published on paper. This fact alone does not produce a particularly diffi cult problem for bibliography. The diffi culty is rather that many of his important writings appeared in ephemeral or semi-published formats, ranging from conference proceedings and magazines of every ilk to self-published books that were produced anywhere and nowhere – at least from the perspective of libraries such as my own that tried desperately to acquire copies. As a result of the vagabond nature of the Nelson oeuvre, few libraries own more than a few of his published works, and several of his most important texts, such as the earliest editions of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines have achieved almost legendary status for being diffi cult to lay hands on. So where are we to turn for the texts? Thus, this bibliography. At least it is a start. My goal has been to put together a complete picture of Ted Nelson’s body of work as expressed in publication, including selections from ephemeral and non-print media. It has not been easy. As the