floored McLuhan, because he had never found 
anywhere else—just as I’ve not found a new 
McLuhan—Marshall had never found another 
person capable of handling the issue of the impact 
of technology on culture the way Innis had. That 
was a very, very big thing.

After that McLuhan was very influenced by 
individual writers. He would then pick and choose. 
The way he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy  was at 
the old library at St. Michael’s College. He had the 
books of people he had read or heard about open 
at the appropriate page and a couple seminarians 
running from one book to the other taking those