A Self-Taught Libertarian Modernist

I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of Lanny Friedlander. But you may have heard of the magazine he started in 1968 when he was a student at Boston University, Reason. With the slogan “Free Minds and Free Markets,” Reason was “just one of many mimeographed zines then pushing a mostly obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism,” to quote from an oral history published in 2008. I had a brief but passionate fling with the writings of Ayn Rand that began in high school and began to fade in college, so I knew about libertarianism and I had heard of the magazine. But it was years before I saw a copy. So I missed its earliest days, and a remarkable and, until now, obscure episode in American design history.

Lanny Friedlander, it turns out, was