Since McLuhan's [new project] would also be a guidebook, "an inventory of breakthroughs in all the arts and sciences," he referred to it as "a Baedeker," after the well-known series of European guides. Later he would refer to it as "the twentieth-century Baedeker." Much later. For he had no idea how accurately he spoke in saying to Dorothy Pound, "a Baedeker for the university frustrates." Intended for "the kind of people who remain illiterate through the misfortunes of current educational misguidance," McLuhan's Baedeker never left his thoughts through the years that he gave to exploring media effects as the causes of that illiteracy.
W. Terrence Gordon