Shine on, you crazy diamond: reason founder Lanny Friedlander, 1947-2011.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: From the Top

LANNY FRIEDLANDER, who founded reason as a student at Boston University in 1968, died in March at the age of 63. All of us at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit organization that grew out of the magazine, extend our condolences to his family. Our debt and gratitude to Lanny can never be repaid, but we hope that our efforts at moving the world toward peace and prosperity honor his memory.

Here's the strangest thing: Nobody currently working at the magazine ever met him. It's been that way for a long time. Virginia Postrel, editor of reason from 1989 until 2000, told me not only that she had never met him but that during her time at the magazine folks didn't even know if he was still alive.

When I began working at reason in late 1993, I asked about this Friedlander guy who'd gotten the ball rolling, whose name was all over the early issues, right there at the top of the mast. Lacking money and business sense but possessing great design chops, Lanny sold the magazine in 1971 to a trio of early contributors: Robert Poole, Manny Klausner, and Tibor Machan. He moved to NewYork, worked with design legend Massimo Vignelli, and continued to work with reason for a year or two.

Then began a long, familiar downward spiral: mental problems, substance problems, health problems, money problems. Contact became sporadic and then stopped altogether. In the absence of an official story, I started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism's answer to Syd Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd who got something great started and then couldn't or wouldn't live in the world he did so much to create. Shine on, you crazy anti-draft, anti-tax diamond, wish you were here.

When we opened our D.C. offices a few years ago, I hunted around for a picture of Lanny to put on the wall--libertarians aren't much for shrines to fearless leaders, but come on--and nobody in the organization could find one. The only one I'd ever seen was a blurry black-and-white snapshot that had captured him sometime in the late 1960s or early '70s, wearing period chunky glasses, wind flapping around what looked to be a comb-over in the making. Even that photo had disappeared. Had he ever really existed in the first place?

Yes, and his legacy hasn't disappeared, whether in terms of magazine design or the world of ideas. One of his earliest admirers was Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired, the publication that not only redefined what magazines should look, feel, and even smell like back in the...