The single published volume of McLuhan's correspondence, edited by William Toye for Oxford University Press — the series' standard reference for dates, recipients, and the offhand formulations McLuhan never printed. Dialogue 68 turns the book inside out: it is one volume of an original four, the remaining three sit uncatalogued at York, and even the published volume slots non-letters in among the letters. New to it — start with dialogue 68.
Across the dialogues
Turns from source into problem — the published book is revealed as a quarter of what was assembled, with the other three volumes sitting unread at York and its own contents mis-sorted, so the archive the series has been citing becomes itself a thing to be investigated
The fact that reframes every citation the series has made from the book — what reads as the correspondence is a quarter of the assembled material, so absence from the volume proves nothing about what McLuhan wrote.
"the letters that we have is one volume of four volumes that were put together."
The missing three are not lost but merely unvisited, sitting with Matie Molinaro's papers at York — which converts a gap in the record into an available piece of fieldwork.
"And so the original four volumes of the letters are all there."
The scholarly vacuum stated as such — decades on, the fuller correspondence surfaces only as stray quotations in biographies, which is Cameron's evidence that no one has worked the original volumes through.
"But I don't know that anybody has done a thorough job."
Connections
Toye and OUP cut an original four volumes down to the single published one.