The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

A visual essay on how successive media reshape the environment in which people think and live, set as a sequence of pages where text and image carry equal weight.

The book was produced by Jerome Agel and first published in New York by Random House in 1967, with Bantam issuing a paperback the same year. It combines McLuhan's statements on technology and culture with about one hundred black-and-white illustrations arranged by Quentin Fiore, and it asks readers to attend to the effects of a medium rather than its content. The Gingko Press softcover in a small 4 × 7 inch format reprints it at 160 pages, and the publisher calls it McLuhan's most popular book, perhaps as influential as Understanding Media.

Marshall McLuhan (1911 to 1980) also wrote Understanding Media. Quentin Fiore is credited as co-author, and Jerome Agel as producer.