Stewart Brand: The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987)

A magical mystery tour through the world of MIT’s Media Laboratory, then headed by Nicholas Negroponte and in its third year of existence. Chapter 11 develops the dictum “information wants to be free.”

Publisher Viking, New York, 1987
ISBN 0670814423
285 pages

Review (Visual Resources, 1989)
Review (AI Magazine, Lee S. Brownston, 1990)

PDF (50 MB, updated on 2014-3-26 to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

Philip Marchand: Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989)

He was described as “the greatest put-on artist of all time” and even as the greatest intellectual pioneer since Freud. Bouncing back and forth between the quiet University of Toronto campus and the glitzy world of the New York media, McLuhan was surely the most unlikely prophet of the sixties, yet his work underlies any serious discussion of the effects of media on our lives. (from the back cover)

Publisher Ticknor & Fields, New York, 1989
ISBN 0899194850
320 pages

Review (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times Books, 1989)
Review (E. Hamilton, Canadian Literature, 2001)
Review (Robert McKenzie, IPCT, 1994)
Review (William H. Melody, Information, Communication & Society, undated)

Author

PDF (50 MB, no OCR)

Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987)

McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Bob Newhart, Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter.

Heavily annotated, the letters are arranged in three sections, each with a period introduction: 1931-1936 takes McLuhan through the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University. 1936-1946 covers one year’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin; two years at Saint Louis University; one year, with his bride, at Cambridge for work on his Ph.D.; four more years at Saint Louis; and two years as Assumption College, Windsor, Ontario. These letters include a large correspondence with Wyndham Lewis. The last section begins in 1946, when McLuhan went to the University of Toronto. Two years later he began a long correspondence with Ezra Pound. Covering the period of McLuhan’s fame, it ends in September 1979 with a letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, written shortly before McLuhan had a stroke that rendered him speechless.

These letters have been selected from a large collection, now in the Public Archives of Canada, and offer a valuable commentary on McLuhan’s work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available.

Selected and edited by Matie Molinam, Corrine McLuhan, and William Toye
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1987
ISBN 0195405943
562 pages

Review (R.D. Berg, Canadian Journal of Communication, 1988)
Review (Frank Kermode, London Review of Books, 1988)

PDF (189 MB, no OCR, any help in reducing the size is welcome!)