A book is a beginning.
In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living things—but I know differently: books, libraries, are not inert, and there is more than meets the eye.
There they sit, shelved and ready, all but bursting their bindings. Books on shelves as bullets in a magazine, tense and alive with purpose. They yearn to teach, as those who would learn reach out a hand to accept their invitation. …
In ‘the scriptorium’ (as Eric McLuhan called his library, an old repurposed two-story barn) I sit at my desk, an ancient oak refectory table my parents brought back from England many years ago. A box is beside me. It may have been packed in the late 1970s, when Marshall was forced out of the Centre for Culture and Technology. It may have been packed when his widow Corinne died in 2008 and their majestic house on the pond, No. 3 Wychwood Park, was being sold. All those books were inherited by my father, his for the work he did with his father, the work he’d carried on all those years since Marshall died on the last day of 1980.
I don’t know what books I will find in this box—no one does, really—and that’s why I am here making an inventory, opening box after box whose contents haven’t seen the light of day in years, perhaps decades. Maybe Marshall himself was the last to leaf through a given volume’s pages. Maybe its author gave it to him, signed to him in friendship or respect. Maybe Marshall breezed through it and found it unremarkable, or maybe he picked out a word here, a phrase there, sparking an insight in his own work. Maybe he made notes in the inside covers corresponding to pages within, and, turning to those pages, I will find a margin note in his short-hand notation for ‘the medium is the message,’ ‘figure and ground,’ or the many other frequently used categories, or perhaps some quote to use in a future work or speech.
Starting in the winter of 2009, and for the better part of eighteen months, I go through box after box, book after book. I am making an inventory of Marshall McLuhan’s personal ‘working’ library, prior to its relocation. Eric McLuhan had inherited this collection after Marshall’s death, and we refer to them as a ‘working’ library because these are not merely books but tools; not merely research aids but sources of inspiration and wisdom; their writers not merely authors but unwitting, if not unwilling, collaborators. More than even that, these books bear the traces of five decades of intellectual development and work, of relationships. At times they record memories, puns, bad jokes. They contain flashes of insight and connection to be drawn out at a later date. Inside their covers are tucked newspaper clippings, postcards, letters, sheets and sheets of notes, improvised bookmarks, evidence of travel, of meals. They have an instantly recognizable smell and look and feel, and they have a weight which is more than simply pounds and ounces. When you add all those things up, you have more than a collection of books, you have, I discovered to my surprise, quite a bit of Marshall McLuhan.
Many of Marshall’s books were boxed, in storage in Eric and Sabina McLuhan’s big red barn in Prince Edward County, a southern Ontario rural community which has long been a popular attraction for its sand dunes and beaches. More recently, it has been reinvented (perhaps rebranded would be more apt) as a wine region and now enjoys (or doesn’t, depending on who you’re talking to) its new status as ‘Toronto’s Hamptons’ with wine, food, and Airbnbs. It is about equidistant between Toronto and Ottawa, but worlds away from both. It is ideal.
The rest of Marshall’s books were in their places like tools on a workshop pegboard among the books of Eric McLuhan’s library, of a similar size and composition to Marshall’s—which is natural, given their similar interests and areas of study.
Eric began to work with his father Marshall upon his return from his stint in the US air force, which he claimed to have joined rather than (as an American citizen, born in St. Louis, Missouri) be drafted to the army and shipped off to Viet Nam. I do think it was a convenient enough excuse for him to break away, or try to. I know that impulse because I felt it myself. I also know that, despite the attractions and objects of youthful rebellion, there’s something in our blood which calls us back to the books; to read, to wonder, to explore, to write.
Eric returned with a undergrad degree, the first edition of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man which Marshall had inscribed (“for Eric, me flaming electric bhoy, this book about the electric age. Dad, May 15/64”) and sent, hot off the press, and a head full of ideas about, among other things, what James Joyce was getting at with those extremely long words in ‘Finnegans Wake.’ He returned and began working with his father as student and assistant—and eventually as collaborator and co-author.
Marshall died unexpectedly, at a fairly young age, on New Year’s Eve 1980, leaving Eric to carry on as best he could. I can imagine how he felt, because Eric died in the spring of 2018, while I was traveling with him in Colombia for a speaking engagement. The night before he died in the hotel room, Eric McLuhan delivered a speech titled ‘Media Ecology in the 21stCentury’ which would be his last words on the subject, and a fitting final address at that. Eric was 76 years old (1942-2018), achieving a few years more than Marshall had (1911-1980), but still his death was unexpected.
It’s not a fair comparison. Eric co-wrote Marshall’s books, while I simply carried Eric’s. Eric earned his undergrad, Master’s, and Ph.D., as well as receiving honorary degrees. I dropped out of a college journalism program. However, our paths, while different, are parallel—and if not precisely parallel, they are at least soundly resonant. I feel that as a non-academic self-described and -published poet, I am ideally placed to carry on the McLuhan tradition, because it is past time for it to leave academia and join again the wider world which so desperately needs it. We are at a juncture where the effects of technologies are faster, more potently and widely felt than ever before—without not only understanding but action we have little hope of turning things around and taking control for once. McLuhan studies can take us a lot of the way there. What gives me quite a degree of hope, has me feel much less alone, is that while Marshall and Eric are gone, strictly speaking, they remain quite present in the books they left behind. They have more left to teach than I alone can hope to learn.
I am currently in the process of making an inventory of Eric McLuhan’s library. As Eric learned from his father, so he worked in a similar fashion, and his traces are added to his books as his father added to his. I am following Eric through the years through his books, and in that process I am strangely reliving my own childhood and adolescence but from a different perspective. Here’s a book he bought in 1983, when I was five—the age my eldest son Ezra is now. When I was five, dad was reading this book, which he bought at this date, in this place. The train ticket stub he used as a book mark shows he’d been commuting between here and there for one of the few teaching gigs he managed to find—his surname being more a hinderance than a help in academia then as now. His notes, marginalia, underlinings show his reading, what was important, how this particular work relates to the larger McLuhan work. Like Marshall, Eric felt free to make note of what, in terms of that work, the author knows and also what they’re ignorant of.
Annotations, like breadcrumbs.
Trail markers, for the keen eye and mind.
Clues, directions.
Seeds seeking fertile ground.
They are that and more, and they are contained within physical books. In light of this, it’s funny to consider that, aside from being read, some readers and authors assume a book is finished when it’s published (I think painters generally know better). I’m sure many of the authors whose books Eric and Marshall have used in their work would be appalled to read the notes made between the covers—between the sheets, as it were. I’m sure some would feel abused, as I’m sure others would be delighted.
Even today, the books in Marshall’s library now at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, the books in Eric’s library in his ‘scriptorium’ near Bloomfield, have not finished their journeys. They taught and were transformed by Marshall and Eric, and now they can teach us.
I have avoided bringing electronic books into this discussion because I wanted to avoid dismissing them. I didn’t want you, dear reader, to think I was a luddite or simple nostalgic. However, if I don’t say something, I run the risk of implication by omission.
The electronic word is an evolution of the typewritten word, the handwritten word, the spoken word, the thought. Each have their place, their advantages, their disadvantages. Ours is a time and place in which they all exist in varying degrees. I try to consider a library like Marshall’s or Eric’s as an electronic library of e-books and pdf’s, and I simply can’t. When you think of all the things you can do with a physical book, all the things you can learn about a book’s owner, all the sensory information—you just can’t beat a book.
Though there are no signs of an end to the printing of books, even if no other book was ever printed after this one, the future of books would be bright. No, the printed book is not dead—not nearly. Indeed, I can say from experience and without hesitation that (mark my words) the best is yet to come.
Picton, Ontario
September 2019
Edna Pasher
I loved it! You are a great story teller!