Canadian Library History Blog

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 books ...

“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 20th Century-Fox film version starring Henry Fonda was equally successful at box off...

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. Marshall McLuhan Addresses Librarians about the Future of the Book in Oshawa, 1956 After he began teaching and researching, McLuhan started to articulate how new electronic media would fundamentally change the role of traditional printed publications and how institutions, such as libraries, would respond to these shifts. He addressed delegates about “The Future of the Book” at a...

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 surely was not cause for detailed discussion, especially if it was published in New York. It was an American review in the July 1940 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 tren...