There is no sense in putting an igloo in a heated space. There’s no use showing off snowshoes behind glass. Right out there you have Alice in Wonderland, the original Dodgson manuscript of it. Then we have the expurgated edition, illustrated by Tenniel, in which all the grammar was cleaned up. … But interestingly, the Lewis Carroll drawing of Alice – this is Alice when she is ten feet tall – starts to distort at the feet. She has little girl’s feet, and the attenuation starts and moves right up through the whole figure…. When you get the Tenniel edition set in type, you get a drawing which, if you cover it from the shoulders down, is a perfectly formed little girl. The only attenuation that Tenniel could manage to achieve, was to lengthen the neck and then, rather frighteningly, he raised the collar to hide it. So there was no real sense of the spaces of Lewis Carroll. And of course, the type bears no relationship to the illustrations…. What I’m simply saying is that Tenniel is a highly literate illustrator who was totally incapable of dealing with the mathematical and non-visual spaces of Lewis Carroll.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pp 99-100
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Museum | Linear and Nonlinear
↪ Also at #3511
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan