funniest article pagination ever

The good people who ran the McLuhan Centennial in Brussels last October are putting together a conference anthology. Today they sent me my copyedited manuscript which contained two queries.

The first concerned a sentence about Husserl rendered nonsensical by some missing words, which I inserted. But the second was that they wanted to know the pagination of a specific McLuhan text from which I had quoted.

The text in question was McLuhan’s 1969 interview in Playboy, famous in McLuhan studies in part due to the famous phrase that “the content of a medium is about as important as the graffiti on an atomic bomb,” or words to that effect, and that was precisely the quotation I was using.

The problem with citing this phrase is that I don’t know the exact pagination. I don’t own that issue (or any issue) of Playboy. To try to obtain a 43-year-old issue of the magazine on eBay would surely be both expensive and somewhat uncomfortable, and it could be even more uncomfortable to ask your librarian to get you a copy (especially if you live in Egypt, where I believe Playboy also happens to be illegal). All I have, and presumably all that most McLuhan readers have, is the PDF of an interview typescript that starts with Page 1 rather than with the actual magazine pagination.

But after a bit of hunting, here is what I found as the correct pagination of the McLuhan interview: pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63. (!!!)

You can just imagine what’s on pages 28-44, 46-54, 57-60, and 62.

What would be the proper protocol for getting this piece on interlibrary loan in the States, assuming that you just wanted the interview? I’d feel a bit ridiculous asking for such gerrymandered pages from a librarian, but also wouldn’t necessarily want to order pp. 26-63 just to make it simpler. That might earn you an unpleasant lecture about library policy.