Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews.

All the world exists to end in a book. -Mallarme.

Marshall McLuhan essay on the “Future of the Book” given as a lecture in 1972: “In both the industrial and electric ages Nature is superceded by Art. Thus the future of the book is nothing less than to be the means of surpassing Nature itself. The material world is to be etherealized and encapsulated in a book whose characters will possess all the formulas for the knowledge and recreation of Being.”

“When the book and its author can mount the back of another medium like radio or TV or satellite, the scale of operation both in time and in space seems to abolish the difference between the microscopic and macroscopic.”

“If print drove Montaigne to minute self-investigation and self-portrayal, may we not expect the book of the electric age to turn this perspective on patterns of corporate human energy and association?”