"OURS IS THE FIRST AGE IN WHICH MANY THOUSANDS OF THE BEST-TRAINED INDIVIDUAL MINDS HAVE MADE IT A FULL-TIME BUSINESS TO GET INSIDE THE COLLECTIVE PUBLIC MIND"

MCLUHAN, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: Vanguard, (1951). Quarto, original black cloth, original dust jacket. $975.

First edition of McLuhan's richly illustrated first book, a blistering survey of the contemporary advertising and pop-culture landscape.

The Mechanical Bride is the culmination of nearly two decades of McLuhan collecting advertisements, comic strips, posters, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other samples of popular culture that he would weave into presentations, lectures, and scholarly articles—a vast archive that he referred to as his "Guide to Chaos," among other titles. McLuhan's overarching idea was that by focusing his audience's attention on the strategies and techniques used by advertisers, he would in essence inoculate his audience against these "invisible" and subliminal effects. "McLuhan emphasized that [the book's] attack on advertising was not to galvanize the public into sales resistance, 'a frivolous expenditure of effort which would only land the reader deeper than ever in the emotional morass of irrational reactions.' His purpose, he said, was much more radical. 'Nothing less, in fact, than fully conscious awareness of the multiple inter-relations of all these things'" (Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, 140). As McLuhan writes in the Preface: "The present book makes few attempts to attack the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress and in which everybody is involved. From the analysis of that action, it is hoped, many individual strategies may suggest themselves" (page v).

"By the fall of 1948, McLuhan had an agreement with Vanguard Press of New York for the publication of 'Guide to Chaos,' referred to in the contract with the publisher as 'The Folklore of Industrial Man,' the eventual subtitle of the book… There was much consternation in New York, if not outright terror, as McLuhan's manuscript circulated among the staff of Vanguard Press. The work resisted the conventions of book production, defied the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the most benevolent editorial midwifery, and stunned the hapless publisher into inertia" (Gordon, 145-46). After several rewrites—and several editors—McLuhan's "Guide" finally appeared, under the title The Mechanical Bride, in 1951. Reviews ranged from "brilliant" to "baloney," and sales slow. Nonetheless, the provocative final work brought McLuhan a number of invitations to conferences and speaking engagements, and his reputation and list of correspondents from around the world began to grow. He and fellow professor Ted Carpenter also won a grant from the Ford Foundation "that permitted McLuhan and Carpenter to launch their interdepartmental seminar in culture and communications in 1953… The momentum generated by the seminar and the results of its investigations eventually led, eleven years later, to the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. It was to the seminar, and not to himself, that McLuhan attributed the crucial discovery that media are extensions of the human body and of the nervous system" (Gordon, 160). Published simultaneously in Toronto by Copp Clark.

Book fine, dust jacket very good with a bit of rubbing, chipping to spine head. An excellent copy of a book difficult to find in such nice condition.