The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more

Vous voulez voir cette page en français ? Cliquez ici.


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime Free Trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn More
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Search inside this book
Start reading The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

The Gutenberg Galaxy [Paperback]

Marshall McLuhan (Author)
4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 32.95
Price: CDN$ 20.65 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details
You Save: CDN$ 12.30 (37%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 1 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.
Want it delivered Friday, May 24? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.

Formats

 Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition CDN $18.30   -- --
Hardcover --   -- --
Paperback CDN $20.65   -- --
Mass Market Paperback --   -- --

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31 2011

The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before.

Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global village’ that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries — despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous.

This new edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy celebrates both the centennial of McLuhan’s birth and the fifty-year anniversary of the book’s publication. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. This edition also includes new introductory essays that illuminate McLuhan’s lasting effect on a variety of scholarly fields and popular culture.

A must-read for those who inhabit today’s global village, The Gutenberg Galaxy is an indispensable road map for our evolving communication landscape.

Frequently Bought Together

The Gutenberg Galaxy + Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man + The Medium Is the Massage
Price For All Three: CDN$ 49.94

Show availability and shipping details

  • In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details

  • Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan Paperback CDN$ 18.50

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details

  • The Medium Is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan Paperback CDN$ 10.79

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Product Details

Product Description

From Amazon

Movable type, as much if not more than any meaningful arrangement of that type, transformed Renaissance consciousness--just as electronic circuitry is transforming us now. That is the basic premise of Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. New technologies create new human environments, and "technological environments are not merely passive containers … but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." McLuhan's second book, The Gutenberg Galaxy was published in 1962, won the Canadian Governor General's Medal that same year, and pushed McLuhan toward international prominence. Like most of McLuhans's other work--Understanding Media or The Global Village, for example--The Gutenberg Galaxy is a rich, dense text that draws freely, almost frantically, from works of philosophy, economics, political theory, history, and especially literature. There are liberal doses of Shakespeare--text and commentary--sprinkled throughout, as well as trenchant appropriations from Rabelais, Cervantes, Leibnitz, Blake, Joyce, and many others. Attempting to match his medium to his metaphors, McLuhan structures his book using what he calls "a mosaic or field approach" and ends up producing more than 100 short sections separated by pithy glosses in large bold type, such as "Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy," or " Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society." Today's reader might find the "mosaic of perpetually interacting forms" into which the author organizes his data and quotations distinctly Web-like. Indeed, one could say of McLuhan and his complex rhetorical circuitry what McLuhan himself says about Shakespeare: "His insights appear so richly in his lines that it is very difficult to select among them." --Russell Prather --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

‘Endlessly stimulating, informative, and liberating.’ (The Observer Weekend Review)

‘The book that helped establish McLuhan as the original media guru.’ (The New York Times)

‘Think of anything and you can now get your fill of multimedia feedback and facts at the press of a button. McLuhan saw this coming, and wrote about its impact on us as individuals and members of the “global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Revisiting it … is a revelation.’ (Nigel Beale The Guardian)
See all Product Description
Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Search inside this book:

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

› Explore similar items

Customer Reviews

5 star
7
4 star
1
3 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
4.9 out of 5 stars
8 reviews
4.9 out of 5 stars
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars His Best Work April 17 2000
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
McLuhan's most enduring work and certainly his most accessible. A history of western society from a media perspective. McLuhan concentrates on the larger patterns in history by providing a snapshot of each period with a rich bibliography to fill in the details. A mosaic of the works of other writers arranged to get at more abstract ideas. The book is filled with great understanding and insight, often packaged as gnomic utterances but rarely without substantial scholarly support behind them. He stole from the best and without shame and put ideas together like no one else. Not so much an original thinker (for which we can be grateful given some of his crackpot ideas) but a chemist experimenting with the works of others to great effect. Misunderstood and disliked in his own time, idolized in the present for all the wrong reasons. We will not see his like again.
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes
No
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars McLuhan - As Always, Brilliant Feb 2 2000
By Allen Smalling
Format:Paperback
One can almost think of "The Gutenberg Galaxy" as the "prequel" to Marshall McLuhan's much better known "Understanding Media," because "Galaxy" does for print techology what "Media" does for electronic technology. Basically McLuhan assesses how European civilization went from an ear-touch (listening) oriented mode of receving information to an eye-oriented (that is, reading) mode of receiving information. Recalling that for McLuhan, the medium IS the message, so the invention and dissemination of printing-press technology and the sharp rise in literacy it occasioned therefore brought about a major seismic shift in Western thought and all that goes with it--language, mores, dress, politics, etc.

Another way of looking at this is to say that in McLuhan's view, history is not determined by politics or economics or weather or science per se so much as by our media--the "extensions of man." This book is a must-read followup to anyone who liked "Understanding Media"; it's also a great book to cut one's teeth on before reading "Understanding Media" because it's a more traditional (i.e., formal and linear) type of academic work. And undeniably brilliant. For what it's worth, I was a communications major at the University of Virginia in the mid-1970s when reading McLuhan's work was rougher than it is now; many of his concepts like "global village" have since filtered thru society. But I read all of McLuhan's media-oriented writings, wrote term papers on him, and feel as though I benefited as a result--he's the main reason I'm a writer today.

Allen; charless@ync.net

Was this review helpful to you?
Yes
No
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars HITCH-HIKERS GUIDE TO THE GUTENBERG GAL -LEXY Feb 27 1998
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This book will alter your perception of reality. It will cause you reflect on your environment, the definition of which will have expanded because of this book. In addition you will be introduced to authors and concepts from an eclectic range of disciplines, all juxtaposed to create insight (my clue in) into McLuhan's ideas. I read this one first, and I've continued on since then. His insights have practical application on how to surf in today's rapidly changing whorl-pool world.

McLuhan makes his case that: technology shapes our experience, and that to be unaware of technology's pervasive influence is to succumb to "robo-centrism." His insightful analysis of the effects of technology leads him to focus on the causes, believing that awareness of the causes can modify the effects. "The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force we have made ourselves." And so, "Some may feel that life is too valuable and delightful a thing to be spent in such arbitrary and involuntary automatism."

Was this review helpful to you?
Yes
No
Want to see more reviews on this item?

    Your Shopping Cart is empty.

    Give it purpose—fill it with books, DVDs, clothes, electronics, and more.

    If you already have an account, sign in.

    View Cart (0 items)

      Listmania!

      Create a Listmania! list

      Look for similar items by category

      Feedback

      Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

      Amazon.ca Privacy Statement Amazon.ca Shipping Information Amazon.ca Returns & Exchanges