Nearly every decade has its own claim to a revolution that is the biggest since the invention of the printing press. Well, what was that original revolution, still the defending champion of cultural upheavals, actually like? In <I>The Gutenberg Galaxy</I>, University of Toronto theorist Marshall McLuhan described the shift from an oral to a print culture and in the process set off a bit of a revolution of his own. <I>The Gutenberg Galaxy</I>, the first of McLuhan's major books, is also the most accessible, but, as you would expect from the man who told us that "the medium is the message," it's innovative in style as well as content, structured as a mosaic of short essays, quotes, and aphorisms, one of which introduced the idea of the "global village" to a world that would soon fulfill McLuhan's prophecy. 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 <I>The Gutenberg Galaxy</I>. 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, <I>The Gutenberg Galaxy</I> 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--<I>Understanding Media</I> or <I>The Global Village</I>, for example--<I>The Gutenberg Galaxy</I> 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." <I>--Russell Prather</I>
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