were no longer central; books were no longer the 
centre of culture.” So, he may have used the 
phrase “the death of the book,” but by the death 
of the book he meant the death of the book as 
king of knowledge. He didn’t mean books were 
going to go away. So professors used to really 
joke about this, saying, “You know Marshall, he 
says that books are dying and where does he say 
it, he says it in a book.” I heard that one in 1962 
and then I actually heard a professor saying the 
same thing in 1987 at the University of Toronto. A 
lot of professors found him an annoyance, just as 
he found them an annoyance, but certainly he 
wanted to challenge what he considered the filing-