Explore the McLuhan-inspired Letterpress Chapbook and Digital Tetrad
“A Tetrad” letterpress chapbook
The John M. Kelly Library celebrates its 50th Anniversary with the release of a chapbook designed and produced by Deborah Barnett in our Print Studio. A Tetrad is a hand-printed, hand-sewn and bound Coptic-stitched letterpress chapbook.
This chapbook – released at the Canadian Fine Press Exhibit – honours Marshall McLuhan, a St. Michael’s College professor who rattled the world with his take on the influence of media and technology. The chapbook is called A Tetrad and is both a hand-printed letterpress and interactive digital instance of McLuhan’s tetrad concept.
Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad refers to a set of four media laws he believed you could apply to any human creation, from ideas to artefacts. When a new brainchild appears, McLuhan says, it affects existing culture in four ways: it Enhances, Reverses, Retrieves, and Obsolesces.
See the “A Tetrad” video below.
Enhances
By galvanizing a new possibility
Reverses
By taking a new possibility to such an extreme that it eclipses its original intention.
Retrieves
By dipping into the historical-cultural bank of human experience to adapt an old idea.
Obsolesces
By nudging aside current ways of thinking.
A Tetrad: Letterpress
Detail of “A Tetrad” printing plate
“A Tetrad” letterpress chapbook
The making of “A Tetrad” letterpress chapbook
“A Tetrad” Binding Detail
What is “A Tetrad”?
The digital instance of A Tetrad “nudg[es] aside current ways of thinking” and channels its bespoke letterpress counterpart.
Other collaboration – the culture of investigation
Enhances
“McLuhan changed the way people thought about technology […] But I’d also like to always call attention to the ideas, people and populations who are most excluded, often by design, in imagining and developing the digital worlds we can’t escape from.”
Sarah Sharma, Director of The McLuhan Centre
Enhances
Canonicity – the documentation of McLuhan’s writings, his major ideas
What does the McLuhan collection REVERSE?
Reverses
The global village, the medium is the message, the laws of media, hot and cool media
“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.”
Marshall McLuhan
Reverses
Retrieves
What does the McLuhan collection RETRIEVE that was previously obsolesced?
Remembrances – oral history
Retrieves
The preservation of nuance – nostalgia, memory’s echo
The presence of McLuhan on campus, the University of St. Michael’s College as a physical place
Retrieves
Catholicism – faith in an intellectual community History – a dialogue with the past Constant re-exploration
“The Centre [for Culture and Technology] was merely a kind of weathered brick and comfy sort of house overlooking Queen’s Park, not one of those high-tech buildings over on the main campus.”
Larry Rosenthal, personal remembrance
Obsolesces
What does the McLuhan collection OBSOLESCE? Stable mastery of a topic. Bibliography – a core body of works.
Obsolesces
Ever-changing and reappraising his own ideas, McLuhan cannot be reduced to a single point of reference, a single statement or fixed position.
Ever-changing and reappraising his own ideas, McLuhan cannot be reduced to a single point of reference, a single statement or fixed position.
Obsolesces
Prescience – future replaces the predictions of the past
The limits of prophecy – specificity of past insights are replaced by further re-exploration
Obsolesces
“Precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all-pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.”
Marshall McLuhan
The Canadian Fine Press Exhibit microsite is featured on a series of iPads at the Kelly Library and invites exploration.
Interactive Digital Tetrad
The interactive digital version of A Tetrad enables guests to contribute their ideas to Enhances, Reverses, Retrieves, and Obsolesces.
Purchase a Copy
Signed by Michael McLuhan • Limited editions • Letterpress printed on 100% cotton paper • Die-cut and hand-sewn
Buy a copy of this chapbook
One Chapbook . Two Numbered and Signed Editions.
Both sets of limited editions are signed by Michael McLuhan. Chapbooks are letterpress printed from plates on 100% cotton paper and are die-cut and hand-sewn.
Detail of “A Tetrad” printing plate
The making of “A Tetrad” letterpress chapbook
“A Tetrad” Binding Detail