The kind of questions that Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels ask in Electric Information Age Book<\/em>\u2014about McLuhan\u2019s picture books with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore with regard to role clarification in collaborative production and the technomateriality of publishing\u2014may similarly be asked of Parker and McLuhan\u2019s collaborations. Schnapp and Michaels reconstruct the history of the creation of The Medium is the Massage<\/em> and War and Peace in the Global Village<\/em> as experimental \u201cinventory books\u201d and properly remedy the erasure of the team\u2019s efforts, that is, the roles of co-author and corporate communications consultant Fiore and publishing coordinator Agel, not to mention details about McLuhan\u2019s own participation. No matter how non-bookish these books appeared, in examining the layout and printing decisions as well as underlining the differences in de-bookification undertaken in Massage<\/em> in contrast to the more lineal and textual War and Peace<\/em>, Schnapp and Michaels enable us to augment earlier critical statements, such as by Don Theall, who disparaged the Agel-Fiore books as \u201ccorporate art\u201d (Electric Age <\/em>103). Theall included in this category McLuhan\u2019s collaborations with Parker on the books Through the Vanishing Point<\/em> and Counterblast<\/em>. Yet he made an exception when it came to the long-established affinity of Parker for McLuhan\u2019s penchant for James Joyce\u2014War and Peace<\/em> is after all shaped by the quotes from Finnegans Wake<\/em> in its margins\u2014which required a prefatory note and recognition of hidden collaborator Eric McLuhan\u2019s role in decoding the ten thunders. This made a difference for Theall: \u201cthe collaboration with Parker seems more successful than that with Fiore, possibly because Parker has worked closely with McLuhan for years and shares the same interests in Joyce, in various contemporary movements, in the visual arts, and in cinema\u201d (Medium is the RearView Mirror<\/em> 155). It was Theall who originally coined the term \u201cconcrete essay\u201d to describe the collaborative books noted above, including the way in which War and Peace<\/em> achieved the \u201ctechnique of marginalia\u201d that McLuhan had harbored since publishing The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/em>, opening a space for greater consideration of the collaborators themselves and the technomaterial processes of these books\u2019 production. Indeed, such books may be analyzed as quasi-acoustic spaces, remaking reading and repositioning the reader, injecting ambivalence and retaining tactility and inviting multi-sensory participation\u2014these are so-called \u201cnon-books\u201d in an entirely salutary sense. By contrast, the term \u201cnon-book\u201d was used within journalistic circles to disparage McLuhan and Parker\u2019s Through the Vanishing Point.<\/em> For instance, in \u201cMcLuhan Nonbook\u201d former UCLA English professor Jascha Kessler mocks this \u201cillustrated manual\u201d as \u201cnon-enlightening.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, my approach is less concerned with the negative tropes of de-bookification and is more overtly and positively focused on the acoustification of printed pages. This is especially pertinent to Explorations<\/em> 8 and the caper that accompanied the erasure of its colophon. The augmented reprint of this issue ten years later in 1967 by Fluxus press Something Else\u2014a rarity given that issues of Explorations<\/em> have not been reproduced until 2016, with the exception of an anthology of selected essays that appeared in 1960\u2014omitted the colophon of the original altogether. A colophon appears at the end of a publication and makes note of the design, typesetting, and printing details. Not incidentally, such details and notes, once regained, are not completely transparent, even though they provide insight into the details of production. The modification of Parker\u2019s \u201coriginal design\u201d is acknowledged in the reprint.<\/p>\n

Parker rightly counted Explorations<\/em> 8 in his portfolio of key design accomplishments, and his contribution has been noted in detail by keen observers of the journal such as Robert Fulford, who praised his \u201cflamboyant and highly original typography\u201d (\u201cAll Ignorance\u201d 314). Parker was specifically acknowledged on the front page of the original issue, receiving credit for the cover and the interior, his choice of colour inks, and modified typefaces; the eight-page yellow section looks forward to the style of the \u201cunknown\u201d Explorations<\/em> once it moved to the University of Toronto alumni magazine in 1964. However, it was not his first involvement with Explorations<\/em>. He designed the cover of Explorations<\/em> 7 earlier the same year, where it is briefly noted that the next issue will be \u201can experiment in photo-type designed by Harley Parker.\u201d He also received credit for the Anna Livia pages in Explorations<\/em> 5 (June 1955) along with colleagues Richard Grooms, Frank Smith, and Cooper & Beatty Ltd., which also gets a small mention on one page of the spread itself: \u201cExperimental typography by Cooper & Beatty, Ltd.\u201d This design brings into focus typical content from a descriptive colophon, which early issues of Explorations, <\/em>with the exception of issue 8, <\/em>for the most part integrated into \u201cNotes on Contributors\u201d and \u201cAcknowledgements\u201d or spread out on pages throughout the issue.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3.\u00a0Harley Parker and Marshall McLuhan, \u201cAnna Livia,\u201d from\u00a0Explorations\u00a0<\/em>5, ed. Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter (1955; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016): n.p.\u00a0\u00a9 Estate Of Marshall McLuhan.\u00a0\u00a9 Estate Of\u00a0Harley Parker.\u00a0Used with permission.<\/p>\n

What does the 1957 colophon tell us? The typography was known as Flexitype, expertise in which was provided by Cooper & Beatty Ltd. of Toronto. This use of Flexitype migrated from the world of commercial advertising and design to the academic publication process at University of Toronto Press, and it marks an alleged first\u2014at least in terms of the concentrated quantity of its use, but also in relation to the high quality of printing provided by another outfit, Bomac Ltd. of Toronto\u2014not to neglect the type of paper, Paragon Offset Brilliant, and the company that sold it, Provincial Paper Ltd. Together with the sponsorship note from the front matter indicating that the funder was the Toronto Telegram<\/em> newspaper, there is an unusually rich array of information about products and businesses but not persons.<\/p>\n

After Parker graduated from OCA in 1939, he undertook an apprenticeship in typographic design with Cooper & Beatty in Toronto before moving into a position as typographic designer with the T. Eaton Company, probably working in the catalogue division, after which he joined the Canadian army, where he served three years (1942-45). Upon his return he began teaching classes at Ontario College of Art, where he continued until 1957, the year he joined the ROM. He would have known designer Allan R. Fleming through OCA, who became head of typography at the college in 1955, the same year he began working informally with Cooper & Beatty, quickly becoming its Creative Director in 1957. Fleming, too, began his career at Eaton\u2019s (1945-47), but after Parker (Parker is 14 years older than Fleming). The fact that the colophon does not mention Fleming has angered Martha Fleming, who writes in \u201cThe Man who Branded a Nation\u201d: \u201cThe company was forefront; its creative director unmentioned.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to pointing out many of her father\u2019s accomplishments as a designer and researching his legacy and influence (some of the visible manifestations of the academy in Ontario during the 60s and 70s results from Fleming\u2019s work for Trent University and Massey College, not to mention corporate logos for Toronto Hydro, TSO, Gray Coach, and CN), Martha Fleming also calls into question Parker\u2019s role in Explorations<\/em> 8. She further claims that:<\/p>\n

Nominally this issue of Explorations<\/em> was designed by Harley Parker, who taught colour at the Ontario College of Art where Fleming taught typography. Parker, as display chief of the Royal Ontario Museum, would have also helped install the exhibition Fleming assisted in curating (by selecting books for display) there in 1956 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg\u2019s 42-line bible: \u201cThe Art of Fine Printing and its Influence upon the Bible in Print.\u201d\u2019(\u201cThe Man who Branded a Nation\u201d)<\/p>\n

The choice of the term \u201cnominally\u201d suggests that the reality is different from the official credit affixed to the journal. This involves two related events. The first is that P\u00e8re Fleming\u2019s catalogue essay for his curated exhibition, \u201cThe Development of Printing as an Art,\u201d ends on a rather sour note as he points out the paucity of fine Canadian books for display in a Canadian setting, remarking that \u201cthe production of printers and publishers here are still at the level of England in mid-nineteenth century, a period not of bad taste, but of no taste at all\u201d (\u201cDevelopment of Printing\u201d 19). In the end, he found only one Canadian book to display. The cultural cringe of an accomplished Torontonian does not amount to a critical insight.<\/p>\n

The salient point is that Parker did not arrive at the ROM until September 1957, while the exhibition \u201cThe Art of Fine Printing\u201d took place a year earlier in September-October of 1956. Although these dates do not support Martha Fleming\u2019s claims, the second factor looms large. The product known as Flexitype was promoted by Cooper & Beatty through a substantive brochure with abundant typeface samples and glowing self-promotional discourse grounded in the machinic modernization of tradition; Fulford was an admirer of Fleming\u2019s brochures for C&B (\u201cAllan R. Fleming\u201d). Flexitype was in the mid-50s a new photography-based typesetting that directly generated negatives rather than rely on relief surfaces on metal plates, and Cooper and Beatty promoted their advantage this way: \u201cWe\u2019re proud to be the first company to introduce photographic typography to the printing industry across Canada\u201d (\u201cFLEXItype\u201d).<\/p>\n

Beginning in 1955, the distorted typefaces that Parker utilized in Explorations<\/em> were generated by placing a prism before the camera\u2019s lens, captured in a photographic negative; Cooper & Beatty did this in-house using a photo-mechanical process. It seems likely that the advertising copy for Flexitype was the work of Fleming, as his repeated point of reference is Gutenberg, a curatorial interest. For instance, a typical piece of hyperbole: \u201cTypesetting directly into film is the greatest advance in the development of graphic arts since Gutenberg first invented movable type\u201d (\u201cFLEXItype\u201d).<\/p>\n

As a graphic design professional in Toronto, Parker seized the opportunity to experiment by crossing over from commercial methods to academic publishing, a process of de-specialization that was at the heart of his critique of the position of the curator and his public loathing for \u2018POBS\u2019\u2014print-oriented bastards. Additionally, the yearly Typography exhibitions and lectures, at least from 1958-64, occasionally involved McLuhan, who guest lectured at the 1960 luncheon, and also Parker, as these exhibitions would have been his responsibility to mount as they occurred at the ROM (ie. Typography \u201858-\u201859-\u201860-\u201861 and \u201864); moreover, Fleming designed invitations to the exhibits and arranged for OCA students to show their work in them alongside his own. McLuhan\u2019s work was known among members of the Typographic Designers of Canada, especially Carl Dair. Parker and McLuhan tried to enlist Dair to design Through the Vanishing Point<\/em>, but Dair would not take up the project and passed away in 1967, a year before the book\u2019s publication.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4.\u00a0Marshall McLuhan, “Printing\u00a0and\u00a0Social\u00a0Change,” in\u00a0Printing<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Progress<\/em>: A Mid-Century Report\u00a0<\/em>(Cincinnati, Ohio:\u00a0The International Association of Printing House Crafts- men,\u00a01959), pp. 86. Graphic design and page layout (1958) by Allan Fleming (1929-1977), as Typographic Director, Creative Department, Cooper & Beatty Type Craftsmen (Toronto).\u00a0\u00a9 Estate Of Marshall McLuhan. Courtesy Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University.\u00a0Used with permission.<\/p>\n

Martha Fleming astutely reminds us that it was her father who designed McLuhan\u2019s paper \u201cPrinting and Social Change\u201d for the 1959 report published by the International Association of Printing House Craftsmen, in Cincinnati. This remarkable publication is clear about attribution as each paper has a detailed colophon, including a personal reflection by the designer, who explains, in this instance, that he sought to \u201cevoke a feeling of change in the reader\u201d by means of a series of introductory pages consisting of wood cuts and a photograph and the title of the essay, a motif taken up in the page headers in the remainder, using red and black inks, and two colours of paper stock. Still, Fleming attributes the design to the collective efforts of all eleven Canadian Craftsmen clubs. Moreover, it is not Cooper & Beatty but rather the Society of Typographic Designers with whom Fleming identifies himself; C&B provided the type for the body and display elements, and preliminary printing and binding for the essay was done in Canada.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 5.\u00a0Marshall McLuhan, “Printing\u00a0and\u00a0Social\u00a0Change,” in\u00a0Printing<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Progress<\/em>: A Mid-Century Report\u00a0<\/em>(Cincinnati, Ohio:\u00a0The International Association of Printing House Crafts- men,\u00a01959), pp. 887. Graphic design and page layout (1958) by Allan Fleming (1929-1977), as Typographic Director, Creative Department, Cooper & Beatty Type Craftsmen (Toronto).\u00a0\u00a9 Estate Of Marshall McLuhan. Courtesy Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University. Used with permission.<\/p>\n

Although Fleming and Parker were fourteen years apart in age and Fleming died young at the age of 48, they shared the C&B and the Eaton\u2019s art department connections and both were OCA teachers. They both had, most importantly, McLuhan and University of Toronto in common, as Fleming joined UTP as chief designer in 1968 and later even designed protest signs for the Stop Spadina campaign in which Marshall was active; Parker had already joined McLuhan\u2019s Centre as an associate. Both Parker and Fleming contributed design elements to Expo 67 and were active, one as curator and artist and the other as display chief, at the ROM during the years when Typography took place there. Typographic 58 was, as Fulford described it, a \u201cone-man show\u201d by Fleming who even designed the invitation card: \u201ceverywhere you turned in the small room in the Royal Ontario Museum in which the show was held, it is more than obvious that Canada\u2019s first attempt at an annual typographic exhibit was dominated by the work of one man\u201d (\u201cAllan R. Fleming\u201d 268). Ironically, Martha Fleming\u2019s complaint is not so different from the absence of credit for display and installation in published records such as catalogues undertaken by Parker for much of his everyday ROM work. The important point is the confluence of design intelligence in Toronto in the late 1950s, with the commercial training and product innovation and C&B, its leaders such as Allan Fleming, design figureheads such as Dair, and the inter-institutional cooperation between the ROM, C&B, McLuhan, and University of Toronto Press.<\/p>\n