Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale

by R. Buckminster Fuller

Includes the complete text and drawings from a series of twenty-one lithographs Fuller made to give an overview of his philosophy and recounts how the triangular prints were assembled into the Tetrascroll

Genres: Childrens, Fiction

129 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.

Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.

Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.

Reviews

[Mykle · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was very, very young and Bucky Fuller was very, very old, my mother saw him speak at a bookstore somewhere in Minneapolis, and got him to autograph a copy of Tetrascroll, his "children's book", dedicating it to myself and my brother Dave. Mom was very excited -- like a lot of out-there-thinking folks of the sixties, she'd been enchanted by his philosophies of mankind's salvation through the healing power of tetrahedrons. She gave us the book and we looked at it once or twice, but basically found it poorly drawn and hard to read.

Now, as an adult, I have rescued this valuable signed first-edition of Tetrascroll from my mom's bookshelves, and I can confirm: it is poorly drawn and hard to read. And yet, kind of compelling.

I already tried to get through SYNERGETICS, Bucky's big-book-of-mind-blowers for adults. I skimmed that book just enough to know that this book touches on the same superset of Bucky-think as that one. Both are dense and difficult, but this one at least is short.

Bucky Fuller had a way of writing and speaking all his own. Like many philosophers, he found he had to invent his own language in order to get his ideas across. A believer in efficiency, he would pack individual words to their maximum meaning-bearing capacity and then interlock them in precisely-engineered sentences. Like geodesic domes, these sentences are marvels of efficiency. And just like domes, they are hard to install windows in, and some of them leak. On the other hand, he clearly tried and tried and tried to communicate his vision to us poor 3D-enslaved souls. He tried really hard to save the world. You have to respect that.

I think I get why 4-dimensional geometry makes sense. I don't know if I really understand what he has to say about precession. His theory that Polynesians settled Africa and built the pyramids ... color me dubious.

Bucky was a big anti-capitalist -- I never realized that until I read this book. A believer in the greatest good for the greatest number, he spends a good amount of space explaining why money-lending and capital accretion is a ripoff that the right-thinking ancient Polynesian astronauts correctly scoffed at.

Of course he phrases all this political science and geometry in the form of a telepathic conversation between a girl on a beach and three outer space bears, which makes his arguments particularly appealing to the under-five radical psychic set, but kind of undermines them for everybody else.

You know ... I probably just like this because there's bears in it.

[Halliday · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, Bucky Fuller may not have been so bad.

[Clare Szydlowski]

I was originally drawn to this book because it was created as a collaboration between a printmaker and an engineer at ULAE in New York (an artist editions shop with a great history I've been wanting to checkout). It was printed so the pages created a folding tetrahedron, the artwork is hand drawn stone lithographs by Buckminster Fuller and the text was letterpress. But once I got into reading it, I became more engrossed in the story. It is a bit hard for me to understand at times when he discusses the folding of forms in 3D space ( I recommend it to people with great space visualization) but overall, it is an account of the Universe that relates to the world we are aquainted with; seamlessly explaining the physics behind the powerful ying yang form and how that information wove itself through cultural tradition to create the forms' modern day twin in the stitching of a baseball.

[Greyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this weeks ago - thought I'd written a review. It's a children's book for adults - that is, full of wonder, unique presentation of old ideas, and a bit of uncomfortable generalization.

Fun book. My kids will hate it.

[Ludvig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book Buck wrote to his daughter and has lots of very cute illustrations of bears and their place in Universe.