The Case of the Mail Order Bride

I turned 45 this week. Today, I’m going to tell you an unlikely but true story you may not have heard about how Marshall McLuhan became a household name in the 60s: not by accident but by design.

During a class in April, I held up one of my first editions of The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard Press, 1951) before reading from the preface to my students.

“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat, not light, is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.

“Since so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness, and since these programs of commercial education are so much more expensive and influential than the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges, it seemed fitting to devise a method for reversing the process. Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlighten its intended prey? Why not assist the public to observe consciously the drama which is intended to operate upon it subconsciously?” (McLuhan, 1951)

Radical for 1951, remains relevant today.

“The funny thing about this,” I told them, “is that this book was – according to legend – remaindered before it went on sale.” A more conspiracy-leaning version of the story is that it was remaindered because Wall Street Interests got wind of it, were upset at Marshall McLuhan’s shining an unwelcome spotlight on the seedy underbelly of their ‘educational’ enterprise, and intervened. (Fun fact, advertisers once got tax breaks — maybe still do — because they convinced the government that they were merely educating the public. ‘Commercial Education.’ *eye roll*

Whatever the reason, Marshall McLuhan ended up with one or more cases of his book at reduced cost and would sell or pass them on himself. Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood recalls that she bought a copy from him out of his back door in Toronto’s Wychwood Park.

Of that case (or cases), seventy or so years later, a half-dozen copies remain here at The McLuhan Institute. My policy at here is to keep two or three of everything, otherwise free up space. I have enough books and artifacts here that I don’t have to hoard multiples. Besides, selling excess items like remaining copies of McLuhan’s vintage 1969 DEW-Line card deck (plug) have been a way to attempt to keep the lights on and have led to meeting a lot of great people given the old-school process for ordering anything from The McLuhan Bookshop (plugged again), still hosted on my late father Eric McLuhan’s website. (At least until I get The McLuhan Institute’s website a little more up to date.)

I mentioned to my students, digressing as is my wont and actually a feature of the ridiculously involved course I teach on Understanding Media, that I still have one or two copies of the Bride available for sale if anyone wanted one. “They’d be stupid expensive though,” I added.

I really am getting to the point of this article. Bear with me.

‘Stupid expensive’ didn’t deter two of my students who, I discovered after class, emailed to say they wanted a copy. Here is where I got in over my head – not an uncommon occurrence when dealing with McLuhan matters.

I went to Abe Books to see just how ‘stupid’ expensive could get. The top item (we always search for highest price first, don’t we?) wasn’t merely stupid, it was ludicrous: $1475.00 for a copy inscribed by the author to Al McGuire. Wow. I’m not sure who Mr. McGuire was. The most notable person who came up when I searched the name was a US college basketball coach, but the name is unfamiliar to me.

The second entry was half that, at $750.00. That seemed more reasonable, and I think still qualified as ‘stupid expensive.’ It was in California, and signed by Marshall McLuhan (as per the seller’s description) to “Jerry Felgen in monumental memory of August 9-14/65.”

Let me tell you: my mouth went dry, my jaw dropped. I got that feeling you get when you’re at a yard sale and something you just know is worth a lot has a sticker for $1 on it. It is a particular giddiness. Your heart starts beating like crazy and you get a little paranoid that they’re going to see your reaction and you won’t get your treasure. You try to calm down, act cool.

(to be clear, $750 is not peanuts for me but it seemed like a steal, still)

I have no idea who Jerry Felgen was. I do, however, know who Jerry Feigen was, though it appeared (at least at the time) that the book seller did not.

Dr. Gerald Feigen, professional proctologist and amateur ventriloquist (I swear I’m not making that up) was partners with Howard Gossage in a quite interesting creative consultancy called ‘Generalists, Inc.’ Howard ‘Luck’ Gossage, was known as ‘the Socrates of San Francisco.’ A top ad man of his time. His is an amazing story.

What many people don’t know about Marshall McLuhan, is that his rise from academic to celebrity* was far from accidental: it was deliberate, and it was engineered by Gossage and Feigen and Generalists, Inc.

*It would be inaccurate to say that Marshall McLuhan was unknown at the time, that he went from nobody to somebody overnight. Marshall was a well-known expert in modernist poetry and literary criticism in the 1950s, and had also become increasingly well-known as a communications expert also. He first said ‘the medium is the message’ in 1958 at a radio broadcaster’s conference, invited to speak there because of his growing reputation as a ‘communications theorist.’ He’d won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction for The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. He wasn’t exactly unknown. Still, he his star was yet to rise. As so often happens with Canadians, it took some Americans to make that step happen.

According to Gossage’s wife Sally, they were reading in bed one night and Howard was losing his mind over McLuhan’s latest book ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ He determined that the world needed McLuhan, but McLuhan needed help to reach the world. Gossage had a mission.

According to Jerry Mander, another business partner, Gossage got McLuhan on the phone and said “Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?” Apparently that sounded alright to McLuhan.

The rest is history.

In May of 1965 Gossage and Feigen took McLuhan to New York City and spread money around wining and dining just the right people. McLuhan was on the menu and he was found agreeable, if mystifying. What followed was a cascade of press that carried on for several years, starting with Tom Wolfe’s famous question: “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov… What If He Is Right?”

This east coast blitz was to set the stage for the west coast campaign, of which the main event was in San Francisco – a Marshall McLuhan Festival, held August 9-12, 1965.

Herb Cain covered that for the San Francisco Chronicle:

“* * *FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of “The Mechanical Bride,” “The Gutenburg Galaxy” and “Understanding Media,” darling of the critics (“Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic” – New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands “at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies.”

Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, “Where is the last place in town you’d expect to see Marshall McLuhan?” and that’s where we I found him–at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen.”

Yes, they all had lunch together at the topless restaurant around the corner from the now-fabled Firehouse (see photo from Wolfe’s article) which housed Gossage’s agency (currently up for lease).

The signed first edition I was looking at online was a physical anchor across space and time to that event, and that event was a key moment in history marking the point at which Marshall McLuhan went from a notable academic to a household name, thanks to the philanthropic whim of an adman and a proctologist.

It’s quite a remarkable story. Gossage was the kind of guy who believed in worthy causes and grand gestures, as Steve Harrison relates in his 2012 biography ‘Changing the World is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man.’ Gossage read ‘Understanding Media,’ decided the world needed McLuhan’s voice a little louder, and accepted the challenge of seeing whether they couldn’t make that happen. Because he felt it would be a good thing to do.

The remarkable thing is, it worked. Fate and destiny are funny things, but certainly Gossage and Feigen were instrumental in how things actually played out. Marshall McLuhan’s star would rise and fall, but the fact that it rose at all can be directly attributed in no small part to Gossage and Feigen.

Not that all credit is due to Gossage and Feigen. This wouldn’t have worked without McLuhan. Indeed, they tried it again with another person and it didn’t work, but in this case, with McLuhan in the mid-Sixties, it did.

I didn’t need another copy of The Mechanical Bride. Aside from the excess copies I was considering selling to help keep the heat and lights on at The McLuhan Institute (it’s been a cold winter up here, and TMI is mainly self-funded), I have the copy Marshall signed and presented to his mother Elsie Hall-McLuhan, in her day a well-known ‘elocutionist,’

and the copy he signed and gave his son, my father, Eric McLuhan.

This copy however is special. It is a physical bridge to a moment in time when crazy things were possible and with no small effort, we made to happen.

It wasn’t exactly cheap, so I don’t feel like the seller got a raw deal, but I think it was under-valued simply because the seller didn’t know the history involved.

It’s here at The McLuhan Institute now, has become an important part of our collection, something to point at and launch into a remarkable story of how ‘The Socrates of San Francisco’, and his proctologist/ventriloquist partner turned a Canadian academic from an English teacher into an intellectual celebrity.

This story has a bit of a twist though.

When I originally wrote this up, several months ago, I didn’t have the book in hand. To save shipping etc., I had my sister buy it and get it shipped to her near San Francisco from the store in Pasadena (thanks Emily!)

The book arrived this week with my sister and family on their annual summer visit, and I was disappointed, shocked really, to see the seller had decided to write in the book. I do believe it was well-intentioned but I was a little horrified. This was not part of the description, was not in the photo — it had been done after the book had been purchased. From the description of the inscription as to ‘Jerry Felgen,’ it seemed they were at least at the time unaware of the significance. Perhaps they looked it up after they saw the sale come through and discovered the significance.

I was, and remain, stunned. I sell books via the aforementioned shop. I often include a note, on a separate piece of paper, tucked in. I would never dream of writing inside someone else’s book, especially a signed book, and to almost write over the inscription!

Well, I’ve emailed back and forth with the seller. They don’t seem to understand why I would be upset, to my further bafflement. I didn’t demand a refund, but let them know I was upset and considering a formal complaint. I don’t think I will do that, though I remain unsatisfied. After I suggested I would have to have a restoration specialist fix the damage, they offered to pay for it to be shipped back to them and have their restorer attend to it. Frankly, I don’t trust them, for obvious reasons, and additionally I don’t want to ship it out of the country. That seems unwise.

I also polled people on Twitter and ‘let it slide’ narrowly edged out ‘demand partial refund’ and ‘demand full refund.’

So it’s left there. I am thrilled to have this historic artifact as part of The McLuhan Institute’s collection. I am still raw about them defacing the book, but I will leave it (for now, anyway) and it becomes part of the story.

Booksellers: please, if you need to make a remark, please do so on a separate sheet!

Continuing on the theme of writing in books, next week we’ll look at two of Marshall McLuhan’s copies of Ezra Pound’s ‘ABC of Reading.’ In this case, it’s what was erased which is the tragedy. We’ll also use the occasion to explore why Marshall latched onto Pound’s statement from that book that ‘the artist is the antennae of the race.’

Support: My work with The McLuhan Institute is supported mainly by my teaching and consulting work, and a small amount by readers like you. The more the community supports The McLuhan Institute, the more time and work I can put in making this work available and accessible to all.

Postscript:

Apologies for not having posted more frequently in the last month. That’s the way it will probably go with this newsletter for the time being. We live in a culture which urges and sometimes rewards constant production, but that’s not the way I work and I’m not willing to suffer the consequences of engaging in that in order to build an audience. I will continue to put out (as best I can) at least a post a month here, more when possible.

Meanwhile, if you want more, smaller doses of content from The McLuhan Institute, follow us (me) on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, where I also share things as I am able.

Thanks for being here and supporting my work with The McLuhan Institute.

Thanks this week to Rina Atienza for ‘mail order bride.’ Find her here.