Review — Libraries: Past, Present, Future. An address by Marshall McLuhan, 1970

Libraries: Past, Present, Future. An Address delivered by Marshall McLuhan at the Geneseo State College Library School, New York State, on July 3, 1970 for the 13th annual Mary C. Richardson lectures series. Typescript, 32 leaves.

 From the mid-1960s into the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan was sought out as a speaker across North America. The media theorist had coined the famous expression “the medium is the message,” categorized media as “hot” or “cool,” and spoke of an interconnected world as a “global village.” His ideas were controversial and often expressed in a somewhat ambiguous or aphoristic style. One of his messages about the dominance in contemporary society of electronic media, especially television, to the detriment of printed books and newspapers, gave many librarians cause for concern about the future of libraries and traditional print media. Canada’s National Librarian, W.K. Lamb, refused to believe that the book was becoming obsolete. In an interview, he held that the books could be reproduced using computerized telecommunications and that libraries would use computing to automate catalogues to make books available for loan (Ottawa Citizen, 17 June 1967). Daniel Gore, in a November 1970 issue of American Libraries, said, “McLuhan is merely a recent example of the learned man who despises books; the phenomenon itself is ancient.”  Robert B. Downs, in his Books That Changed America, published by Macmillan in 1970, completely rejected McLuhan assertions on the declining fortune of print: “Denigrators of books, such as Marshall McLuhan, would have us believe that books are obsolescent, being rapidly superseded by the newer media. Thus they would hold that books have had their day—possibly significant and influential in earlier eras, but now on the way to becoming museum pieces” by citing the societal impact of popular authors Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader.

Mary Richardson, c.1933

    Yet, McLuhan’s use of the hot-button word “obsolete” pointed more to the trend that printed media were less ascendant and subject to changing technology rather than non-usage and extinction. He made this point in his address at the School of Library Science at the State University College of New York College in Geneseo in July 1970. Geneseo was a liberal arts college which had conferred American Library Association fully-accredited library degrees since the Second World War. The special occasion was the thirteen annual Mary C. Richardson Lecture, named in honour of a former departmental director who had a special interest in school libraries. Dr. Richardson was Librarian and Head of the Geneseo Library Education Department from 1917–1941. McLuhan clarified his remarks about obsolescence briefly:

I have been saying that the book and printing are obsolete for some years. Many people interpret this to mean that printing and the book are about to disappear. Obsolescence, in fact, means the exact opposite. It means that a service has become so pervasive that it permeates every area of a culture like the vernacular itself. Obsolescence, in short, ensures total acceptance and every wider use. (28)

    McLuhan’s use of obsolescence on a broader scale referred to traditional media adapting to technological change by changing their form or usage. Henry Campbell, the chief librarian at Toronto Public Library, picked up on this point when McLuhan’s fame was accelerating. Writing in the May 1965 issue of the Wilson Library Bulletin, he posed the question: “Some of us in Canada are asking: Are libraries hot or cool? Is there a place for libraries in an electronic culture, one of simultaneity, or are they by their very nature trapped in a linear and nonsensory mold that spells their doom?” Campbell did not answer, but he suggested librarians must raise questions about knowledge in all its aspects to know more about librarianship as a profession.

    The Geneseo talk to students and faculty concentrated on the history and current state of libraries in a wide-ranging McLuhanesque fashion. He linked the history of libraries to different eras of media formats—ancient clay tablets and scrolls, medieval codices and manuscripts, the Gutenberg print revolution that enabled rapid knowledge sharing, and the 20th-century electronic environment. As McLuhan saw it, “One of the revolutionary effects of Gutenberg for libraries was that the printed book was both portable and expendable. Uniform and repetitive or mass produced commodities had their beginning with the printed book. The Gutenberg technology of union, moveable types became the pattern and exemplar for all subsequent forms of mass production.” (22) Libraries of all types in the modern sense, he believed, began to flourish with the mass-produced book with an emphasis on the problems of storage and systems of book classification (23). Now, “the paperless, or software library, brings the Gutenberg assembly line of movable types into an altogether new circle of magical effects.” (26) These effects, the new speed of electronic transmission applied to the traditional book, would result in its “strange alternation of use and function. (28) Further,

With the multitude of new forms of photography and reprography, the diversities of utterance and self-outering [sic] have come into being. On the one hand, pictures supplant a great deal of verbal expression and, on the other hand, the verbal acquires an extraordinary new range of resonance and implications. (31)

    McLuhan was less prescriptive about the future of the libraries. To be sure, libraries would continue to exist, but the effects of the all-pervasive electronic world would lead to the release of unknown intents or controls, like the trends and processes unknowingly released by Gutenberg more than five centuries before. McLuhan was forecasting the influence of powerful global media that would erode geographic boundaries and cultural insularity. At Geneseo, he hinted that libraries would continue to connect authors with readers just as they had in the small departmental English library he had used as an undergraduate at Cambridge many years before.

Further Reading:

Parts of the McLuhan 1970 address are incorporated in R.K. Logan and M. McLuhan, The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). This book reproduces and supplements an unpublished manuscript dating to 1979 that McLuhan and Logan co-authored.

An earlier talk by Marshall McLuhan to Ontario librarians is the subject of one of my earlier blogs.

Alexander Calhoun defends The Grapes of Wrath in Calgary, 1940

“The problem of obscenity in books is undoubtedly a very thorny one for librarians. Possibly the only confident statement one dare make on the subject is that there has been in the last generation a marked increase of tolerance on the part of the public toward obscenity in literature. In the main, I think, this is a sign of progress.” — Alexander Calhoun, March 16, 1940, Calgary Herald.

    When the Viking Press published John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, it was generally greeted with critical acclaim in North America. Steinbeck’s masterful story followed the fictional Joad family’s trek to the promised land of California and their struggles once heartbreaking reality shattered their hopeful vision. The novel quickly reached the top of bestseller lists. Its renown gained Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize for Novels and a National Book Award for Fiction within a year. The 1940 movie version starring Henry Fonda was equally successful at box offices.

    Canadian customs officials did not prohibit the importation of the novel into Canada. It was legally published and available for sale. But the novel was also greeted by many opponents who felt Steinbeck employed obscene/foul language, described overt sexual affairs, indulged in religious profanity, and sympathized with dangerous socialist/communist ideas. Some libraries in the United States, such as Buffalo, refused to purchase it; there were a few book burning as well. In Toronto, there were complaints from library patrons that The Grapes of Wrath was not available even a year later, in early 1940. The Chief Librarian, Charles Sanderson, told the Toronto Star that it was one of the books that the library would not buy. Higher literary standards—the highbrow culture of exclusion—often prevailed among library selectors and cautious library administrators.

    However, one library director in Canada, Alexander Calhoun at Calgary Public Library, defended Steinbeck’s work and made a case for its selection and retention in libraries. Calhoun had tentatively decided not to order it when the first reviews came out in early 1939. The American Library Association’s review publication, Booklist, had called attention to Steinbeck’s use of “natural language” and recommended the book be read prior to purchase. Later in the year, Booklist published Helen E. Haines’ article “Values of Fiction” which praised Steinbeck’s novel. She was a reputable American library educator whose judgements were noteworthy. Calhoun decided to read the novel; then he placed an order for the Calgary library.

    Faced in early March 1940 with a complaint by a Calgary city alderman, Hedley C. Chauncey, Calhoun explained his rationale in an opinion piece in Calgary Herald: “My own opinion is that it is so significant as a social document that no library worth of the name should be without a copy.”  He said that a few libraries had banned Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen, although it contained passages of a pornographic nature more shocking than anything in Grapes. He pointed to an American judge’s decision in 1933 to lift the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses. This important ruling clarified a few matters about what could be judged pornographic:

1939 book cover

(1) what was the author’s intention: to write a pornographic book?
(2) a book should be judged as a whole, not by any of its parts or excerpts;
(3) the standard of reference for obscenity should be for a typical adult, not minors;
(4) “dirty,” realistic language is not necessarily pornographic or obscene when taken in a broader context of the book.

This landmark decision eventually opened the door for the publication of serious works of literature that used coarse language or depicted sexual subjects.

    Calhoun explained that his own judgement was only one part that formed his decision. He asked his staff to read the book, and he also looked into the opinion of Calgary library readers. All eleven staff reported they favoured the book’s retention. Calhoun mentioned there had been no demands from readers to have the book removed from library shelves by its many readers. And he had listened to the NBC Network’s radio talk show, America’s Town Meeting of the Air program, “What should America do for the Joads?” Calgary’s library director, along with millions, had tuned in to hear this program on March 7th. He felt the show likely would lead to further investigation of social problems raised in the book by Steinbeck. He closed his opinion piece by commenting that “no minor will be given the book to read without the clear approval of his parents.” His assessment countered the argument that Grapes posed a threat to taint younger teenage minds. Nonetheless, it was a conservative view. Just a few years later, at the end of WW 2, an Ontario teacher, Mary Campbell at Harbord Collegiate Institute, Toronto, expressed her view at a librarians’ discussion group that, “The Grapes of Wrath is a realistic book for senior students. I recommend it for the validity of period and social situation. The profanity is incidental. We should have confidence in our standards. We shouldn’t consider narrow-minded opinions.”

    The controversy over The Grapes of Wrath raised the issues of censorship and intellectual freedom for public librarians and trustees at a time authoritarian regimes threatened democratic nations. In June 1939, at San Francisco, the American Library Association issued a brief three-point “Library’s Bill of Rights.” It stated libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view. Library selections should not be subject to the influence of race, nationality, or the writers’ political or religious views. Further, library meeting space should be made available to all community groups on equal terms regardless of their beliefs or affiliation. In Canada, the short ALA statement was published in the British Columbia Library Association Bulletin in November 1939 without comment. Indeed, intellectual freedom would remain an subterranean issue in Canadian libraries until the Cold War commenced.

Further Reading:

“Calgary Librarian’s Case for the Joads.” Calgary Herald, Saturday, March 16, 1940, p. 30.

Listen to RadioEchoes.com archive recording of the Town Meeting of the Air panel discussion on the social issues raised by Steinbeck that Calhoun referenced [approx. one hour].

Alexander Calhoun’s biography at Ex Libris Association.

Marshall McLuhan speaks to Ontario librarians about books and reading, 1954–56

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, 1945

By the mid–1950s, prominent speakers had become a fixture at Ontario Library Association (OLA) annual conferences. Such was the case in mid-May 1956 when the OLA met at Oshawa’s new McLaughlin Library, which had opened in 1954. This OLA conference was shortened to two days because the Canadian Library Association would meet at Niagara Falls in June. Nevertheless, four hundred and twenty-five persons registered; it was one of the best attended conferences to date. A notable attraction was an emerging University of Toronto professor at St. Michael’s College, Marshall McLuhan. He addressed delegates about “The Future of the Book” at a luncheon on May 16th at the St. Andrew’s United Church in downtown Oshawa.

McLuhan had found an American firm, Vanguard Press, to publish The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man in 1951. In The Bride, he analyzed popular printed resources (e.g., comic strips or visual images in magazine/newspaper advertisements) as agents of social communication and public persuasion rather than transmitters of content. He theorized that readers typically perceived messaging so casually that they failed to notice how it influenced their thinking about lifestyles and social norms. McLuhan believed the form of communication was a very significant force that shaped public awareness because it merged technology and sexual themes in persuasive way, hence the title of his book. The Bride’s short chapters could be read in any order—a method that allowed McLuhan’s readers to concentrate on one topic or skip to another section, much like dialing a radio to find a good program.

The St. Michael’s college professor spoke to librarians about his interpretations of the effect of movies and radio on books. Now television had become another challenge. These electronic media engaged the public in new, different ways; for example, the outcome of elections was less predictable now. But McLuhan felt the future of the book was assured; in fact, every type of media enriched books. All media, including books, are the means of translating one kind of experience into another. Books were an early stage of the mechanization of the written word. Now, television and radio were adopting an electronic mode of operation or production of words. Books allowed readers, in a linear fashion, to delve deeper into knowledge and presented a greater diversity of subjects. Nonetheless, McLuhan believed the public’s perception of the electronification of information was becoming as important in transmitting knowledge through printed media.

R.H. King Collegiate library, 1954

McLuhan’s message was well received at a time when libraries and educators were grappling with the growth of mass media, primarily television and radio, which reached into homes across the nation. In their own right, libraries were important sources of print medium that conveyed detailed information. Indeed, it was the second time the theorist spoke to Ontario librarians in less than two years. The School and Intermediate Libraries Section of OLA invited him to its meeting at the R.H. King Collegiate Institute in Scarborough on Saturday afternoon October 30th, 1954. Margaret Scott was the head librarian at the R.H. King’s library, which was considered a comfortable, modern setting for students. She would later become an associate professor of school librarianship at the University of Toronto Library School. Scott was an active member of the School and Intermediate Libraries section, which dated back to the 1920s to annual OLA ‘round tables’ of librarians and teachers interested in the reading and use of books by young adults. The OLA had formalized this section in 1935 to represent librarians in secondary schools and public librarians interested in young adult reading. Librarians believed libraries to be places where ‘good’ books could be found to counter the effect of mass-produced ‘bad’ books that teens could purchase at local retailers or exchange among themselves.

“The Hazards of Reading” formed the theme of McLuhan’s afternoon session at R.H. King. Despite the spread of electronic mass media in the 20th century, he remained an advocate for book culture. When he asked, “What is the essential core of Book-Culture that is worth preserving?” he was suggesting that a ‘core library’ could be assembled to preserve and make accessible humankind’s knowledge. An informed personal perspective was necessary to remedy the ill effects of standardized advertising and messaging presented in various mass media. Book reading had an effect quite different from the competing media. He made the interesting observation that students come to the classroom “loaded with facts.” The need was not to supply more facts but to help them articulate what they already knew—to help them orient themselves in the midst of the conflicting cultural media surrounding them. McLuhan emphasized the need to study the impact of the new media of communication on the older book culture. His post-presentation comments raised many interesting points; however, questions had to be cut short before the closing school hour.

McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride did not reach the bestseller lists or sweep through the halls of academia. Nor did libraries undertake to assemble ‘core’ collections to represent humankind’s knowledge for their clientele. Later, especially in the 1960s, McLuhan achieved celebrity status with a series of popular books: his phrase “the medium is the message” became the source for many programs, discussions, and articles. Television was a ‘cool’ medium requiring attentive listeners/viewers. He claimed electronic media were supplanting print culture, that the book as a package might become ‘obsolete’ unless it adapted to the new media. His communication theories often seemed to be at odds with the promotion of library service through books. Many, such as Canada’s National Librarian, W.K. Lamb, refused to believe that the book was obsolete. Yet, McLuhan’s use of this hot-button word pointed more to an outmoded technology rather than decay and non-usage. Public librarians especially wondered whether the media prophet’s proclamation that books were ‘hot’—i.e., there was less engagement by the viewer/reader than ‘cool’ TV—helped promote the community services they were offering. Being regarded as a book provider was not so hot to many librarians who pointed to the importance of other library formats, e.g., films and recordings.

All the same, McLuhan was never a foe of public libraries or print culture. The library was a primary print resource, and librarians were reliable mediators in selecting, organizing, and storing information. In fact, he composed a manuscript with co-author Robert Logan in the late 1970s, which eventually was published in 2016 many years after his untimely death at age 69: Robert K. Logan and Marshall McLuhan, The Future of the Library. Before the virtual or digital library existed, McLuhan hoped libraries would better engage their clientele with new electronic media. His message was hopeful because he believed the book would become an information service rather than a mere package on library shelves. Library resources and the range of services also could change in the same fashion. With the establishment of the ‘digital library’ by the first decades of the 2000s, McLuhan’s optimism about books and libraries expressed many years before beforehand at his two OLA sessions appears well-founded.

Further Reading:

Logan, R., K., McLuhan, M. (2016). The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media. New York: Peter Lang.

Neill, Samuel D. “Books and Marshall McLuhan.” Library Quarterly; Information, Community, Polity vol. 41, no. 4 (October 1971): 311–319.

Review—A Regional Library and Its Readers (1940): Libraries and reading in Prince Edward Island

A Regional Library and Its Readers; A Study of Five Years of Rural Reading by H. B. Chandler and J.T. Croteau. New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1940. 136 p. tables, charts, and index.

When it first appeared, in 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, A Regional Library and Its Readers received little notice in Canadian library circles. Peacetime energies were being redirected to the nation's war effort and the establishment of military-camp libraries. An academic publication by the Director of Prince Edward Island Libraries (Henry Chandler) and a college professor (John Croteau) at Charlottetown's St. Dunstan's University was surely not cause for detailed discussion, especially if it was published in New York. It was an American review in the July issue of Library Quarterly that best recognized this innovative Canadian study's linkage of library circulation with the reading habits of rural Prince Edward Islanders and noted the trend to apply more scientific methodology to library activity.

Already, in the United States, a few library reading studies had appeared, notably an urban study by the Borough of Queen Public Library, New York, Woodside Does Read (1935), that presented statistical tables of responses to many questions posed to library readers. In the United Kingdom, more informal library reading responses were being captured in a few localities by volunteer observers participating in the Mass Observation project that sought to record everyday life in Britain beginning in 1937. In British Columbia, the Fraser Valley regional library demonstration gathered reading information after it commenced operations in 1930, but its results were not published or readily accessible. In retrospect, the data collected and analysis published by Chandler and Croteau compares favourably to its contemporary Anglo-American-Canadian counterparts despite some shortcomings noted by Library Quarterly.

What did Chandler and Croteau set out to do? Following the Carnegie funded regional library demonstration headed by Nora Bateson from 1933-36, the PEI government decided to carry on with the regional (actually provincial) library concept. Bateson's success had certainly given an affirmative reply to questions about the utility of regional libraries. Chandler and Croteau, using data gathered during the project and subsequent years, investigated an entirely different area -- the reading Islanders were doing. About 25,000 people borrowed a million books between 1933-38 and Chandler-Croteau, with the help of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics and PEI news and magazine agents, used the collected data extensively. They asked: who read library books? what did people read? which occupational groups made most use of the library? were there changes in reading habits during the five-year period, 1934-38? All these queries were new areas for exploration in Canadian library research.

Despite the innovative work in PEI, A Regional Library did not receive much attention in library histories until Maxine Rochester, "Bringing Librarianship to Rural Canada in the 1930s," Libraries & Culture 30, 4 (1995), 366-90 revisited library efforts in Depression era rural Canada and provided additional analysis in conjunction with the Fraser Valley project. These library projects were complementary to adult education activities, such as the formation of reading clubs. Rochester concluded:

The demonstrations had shown that there was an enormous book hunger in the rural areas, and that once a library service sufficiently financed and of an adequate population base was developed on a trial basis, the citizens were willing to pay for such a service through their taxes. The demonstrations dispelled any assumptions about reading interests of rural people being less sophisticated than people living in cities.

Re-reading A Regional Library can offer many insights. The chapter on Fiction Reading, for example, demonstrated the traditional desire by librarians to circulate the "best books." Library fiction was classed in three categories -- classics and "first-rate modern novels;" modern novels judged to be above the "usual run of fiction;" and lighter reading (mysteries, romances, westerns, etc.). The first two classes comprised 50% of library fiction stock and accounted for 16% of the total fiction circulation. The "lighter" novels (50% of the fiction total) accounted for 84% of the circulation. However, like all lists, one might question the categorization of authors: the book's appendix shows that Lucy Maud Montgomery, Raymond Knister, Joyce Cary, Booth Tarkington, and Jules Verne were just a few of novelists consigned to the lighter class that readers obviously preferred.

A Regional Library provides many interesting facts about rural PEI in the 1930s and adult education activities. Over a period of five years more than a quarter of the total island population registered at libraries to borrow books. Students and housewives comprised the largest number of library card holders -- almost 50 percent but the study concluded that educational attainment, not age or sex, was the prime factor for reading. After five years, total circulation annually reached about 250,000 for a population of 94,000, a significant stimulus to book use in a region where there were few bookstores and formal education usually stopped at junior high school (grades 8-10). Chandler and Croteau's work, in conjunction with Nora Bateson's two provincial east-coast works, The Carnegie Library Demonstration in Prince Edward Island, Canada, 1933-1936 (1936) and Library Survey of Nova Scotia (1938), clearly documented that libraries could make important societal contributions when organized in an efficient and cost-effective manner. These studies, together with others conducted during the Depression, formed a foundation for future growth across Canada.

An online full-text version is now available from the Hathi Trust without any restrictions.