Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
by Marshall McLuhan
Published by McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965
The book that predicted our digital age when computers still filled rooms. Marshall McLuhan's revolutionary book (Second Printing, December 1965) appeared just as television transformed from novelty to dominant medium, yet its insights about how media shape consciousness remain eerily prescient. McLuhan's famous dictum "the medium is the message" exploded conventional thinking about communication, arguing that technologies fundamentally restructure human experience regardless of content.
From print to radio to television, he traced how each medium creates its own environment, its own sensorium, its own way of thinking. This early printing captures McLuhan at peak influence, when his ideas electrified artists, advertisers, and intellectuals equally. His mosaic writing style - aphoristic, non-linear, deliberately fragmented - mirrors the electronic media he analyzed. Decades before the internet, McLuhan described the "global village" and warned about "information overload." Essential reading for understanding our current moment, when we're finally living in the future McLuhan described.
A unique find, and we only have one.
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