A McLuhan sourcebook 275 road, and armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes.—1954 In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.—1954 The written word no longer relates people to the key jobs and functions of our society. The airplane pilot doesn’t depend upon written messages. And the same goes for just about everybody.—1967 PRINT A place for everything and everything in its place is a feature not only of the compositor’s arrangement of his type fonts, but of the entire range of human organization of knowledge and action from the sixteenth century onward. —1964 …the space of the modern classroom is based on the printed book. The kind of uniform, repeatable enclosure of data from the press made it possible for the first time in history to have the same book in front of teacher and student alike…. Modern classroom seating plans persist in the spatial layout of the movable types which gave us the printed page.— 1967 Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.—1964 In five centuries explicit comment and awareness of the effects of print on human sensibility are very scarce. —1964 The fact that print fosters the consumer habit of mind, the readiness to accept completely processed and packaged goods, is a side of print that has been little considered.—1958 Print created the mental habit of communing with another mind. The illusion that you are in close and sympathetic contact with another mind is a natural illusion resulting from quickly following the images on the printed page. It is pure illusion. Nobody had such an illusion before printing, at least, nothing resembling it.—1959 We are perhaps too much a part of the civilization which followed the printing industry to be able to detect its characteristics. Education in the words of Laski became the art of teaching men to be deceived by the printed word.—1964 Not only does print vividly discover national boundaries, but the print market was itself defined by such boundaries, at least for early printers and publishers. Perhaps also the ability to see one’s mother tongue in uniform and repeatable technological dress creates in the individual reader a feeling of unity and power that he shares with all other readers of that