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Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of the modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960s classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively shaped by the means we use to communicate. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'global village' have proved decades ahead of their time.
The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors-stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium Is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques-verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics-that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.
Buckminster Fullers explorations as an architect, engineer, philosopher and futurist are extended into experimental book form through his collaboration with producer Jerome Agel and designer Quentin Fiore. I Seem to Be A Verbs utopian plans, clever insights and light-hearted musings rub elbows with revelatory and often jolting reminders that we are in motion, full of impulsive nerves, flowing blood and constant thought. This fun and challenging book is packed with images, dense layouts and narratives reading both front to back and in reverse. All this to remind us that we are verbs, not nouns! Buckminster Fuller was awarded 25 patents, invented the geodesic dome, the dymaxion car and was expelled from Harvard twice. I Seem to Be a Verb was originally published in 1970. I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless. R. Buckminster Fuller.
"'The Book of Probes' is a collection of Marshall McLuhan's finest words culled from his books, his more than 200 speeches, his classes at the University of Toronto ... and from nearly 700 shorter writings he published between 1945 and 1980"--Jacket.
War and Peace in The Global Village is a collage of images and text that sharply illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on man. Marshall McLuhan wrote this book thirty years ago and following its publication predicted that the forthcoming information age would be "a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest." Marshall McLuhan illustrates the fact that all social changes are caused by introduction of new technologies. He interprets these new technologies as extensions or "self-amputations of our own being," because technologies extend bodily reach. McLuhan's ideas and observations seem disturbingly accurate and clearly applicable to the world in which we live. War and Peace in the Global Village is a meditation on accelerating innovations leading to identity loss and war.
Discover mystery and wonder in Tales from theArabian Nights. The next elegant edition in the Knickerbocker Classic series, Tales from the Arabian Nights is comprised of twenty-one of the most popular tales that were told by Scheherazade to her husband, King Shahryar, in the course of 1,001 nights in order to save her life. Dating over a thousand years, with origins from Persia, India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, among others, the stories include "The Tale of Scheherazade," "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." For folktale fans worldwide, this stunning gift edition has a cloth binding, ribbon marker, and is packaged neatly in an elegant slipcase. Featuring a new introduction, 24 color illustrations by Edmund Dulac, and the classic translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), this volume of Tales from the Arabian Nights is an indispensable classic for every home library.
A new look at the man who gave us ideas "the medium is the message" and "global village".
Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.