The editor of McLuhan: Pro and Con (1968), the collection Bob has cited for fifty years as the source of "millenary ecstatics." His role in dialogue 70 is to be the wrong attribution: Bob's memory places the phrase in Rosenthal's introduction, quoting McLuhan on his own Fordham course, and page 137 turns out to hold Klonsky's essay instead. The page records the collapse of that memory and Bob's account of how it formed. New to it — start with dialogue 70.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the book Bob misremembered from the inside out — the editor whose introduction he was sure carried the phrase, and whose actual page 137 relocates it to a contributor
The book is a sole source, which is why an error inside it propagated for five decades without anything to check it against.
"it was the only place I've ever seen is in this collection of criticism of McLuhan, articles on McLuhan called McLuhan Pro and Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal in 1968."
The error was structural, not verbal — Bob had the phrase right and its location wrong, and the location is what carried the authority.
"I don't know why in my mind all these years I thought it was an introduction to the book."
Bob's own account of how a misreading survives: it is fixed at first contact and never revisited, because nothing in later use requires returning to the page.
"Maybe misread it in 68 and then it stayed there."
The concession that matters — Bob had gone back to the page for the number and still not seen the byline, which is how the image survived even a return to the source.
"So I didn't notice somehow, it didn't change my image, that it was in Klonsky's that he created. So I'm not sure about that now."
Connections
Rosenthal's 1968 McLuhan: Pro and Con is the collection carrying Klonsky's essay and its "millinery ecstatics" parenthesis.
Bob took "millenary ecstatics" from this book in 1968 and built the Dobbs quadrant's characteristic on it.