The electric information age book - Jeffrey T Schnapp

This book will delve into the period in mass marketing publishing when former backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors, "coordinators," and "producers"-stepped up onto the publishing stage alongside authors to produce a set of exceptional books reconfiguring the process and outcome of knowledge production and reproduction. The book's main text will focus on a nine year window in time, beginning in 1966 when Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, first developed The Medium is the Massage into "an inventory of effects," to 1975, the publication year of Agel's collaboration with the exobiologicist Carl Sagan on Other Worlds. In between these bookends, a rich array of experimental ventures emanate from a surprising source: from out of the fold of mass market publishing, expanding the audience for otherwise specialized domains of research and thought. Many of these bear the signature of Jerome Agel: a figure even less acknowledged (not to mention studied) than Quentin Fiore, whose role as co-author has sometimes been a source of disquiet within McLuhan studies circles. Riding on the coattails of the enormous (and unexpected) market success of The Medium is the Massage, these experimental books contributed to the codification of a distinctive new graphics-rich, montage-based genre of bookmaking that resonates significantly in our own era of publishing. As period accounts would have it, they were books for the electronic age: visually fast, nonlinear, multichannel paperbacks, designed for a mentally and physically restless readership of television age readerviewers. They were also the result of unconventional models of collaborative labor.