"WITH GRATEFUL APPRECIATION FOR HIS CREATIVE ENCOURAGEMENT OF MY DAUGHTER": FIRST EDITION OF CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS, WARMLY INSCRIBED BY MARSHALL MCLUHAN

MCLUHAN, Marshall. Culture Is Our Business. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, (1970). Octavo, original pictorial black paper boards, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket. $2250.

First edition of this heavily illustrated experimental work on advertising and culture, inscribed to a culture journalist and advertising mogul: "Cordial Greetings to Peter Rosenwald with grateful appreciation for his creative encouragement of my daughter Teri. Marshall McLuhan."

"Once again Marshall McLuhan has endeavored to read the currents of the maelstrom of masscult-midcult mainstream American thought, exclusively using… the flotsam and jetsam of American advertising as his points of orientation" (Jones, Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 4, Iss. 4, 984-85). "In this his latest book Marshall McLuhan returns to his first love, advertising, and continues that guided tour so brilliantly begun in his Mechanical Bride 20 years ago. I say 'book,' but with its selection of recent ads on the right-hand pages and a mind-blowing aphoristic commentary on the left, it is really more like a slide show. A most bewildering slide show, to be sure, as one might expect from this leading exponent of jump-cutting, montage, and all things Cubist, Culture Is Our Business is an aggressively disorganized and dislocating experience… Indeed, the formal intention of the work as a whole is to force the reader to discover present mythologies by participating in them… It is in this sense that Culture Is Our Business can be seen as a kind of Symbolist poem, not unlike Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which McLuhan quotes throughout. Above all, however, it is an exhibition of highbrow pop art… at its best very good indeed. Just as Warhol's soup labels put on something else when exposed to a new environment, so the ads reproduced in this volume let the ironist into what's left of and what's new about culture" (New York Times). This copy is inscribed to Peter Rosenwald, founder of the advertising agency, Wunderman Worldwide, as well as an award-winning culture and world affairs journalist for New York Magazine.

Book fine, unfaded dust jacket near-fine with minor wear and a few pinpoint holes mainly to extremities. A handsome inscribed copy.