McLuhan's reputation in the 1960s hinged to a considerable extent on his pronouncements about the book, which was considered the prime bulwark against the threat posed by television, and, more broadly, ‘the media’, a concept to which McLuhan was ineluctably connected. McLuhan's comments about ‘the end of book culture’ (Counterblast [1969], p. 48) were thus not well-received, and he was excoriated by critics for his ‘assault’ on the book. Dame Rebecca West, in her 1967 presidential address to the English Institute in London, asserted that The Medium is the Massage was designed ‘to cheer illiterates on their way, and this is not a petulant description, for the burden of Professor McLuhan's gospel is that illiterates should be cheered on their way’; such a person, she concludes, ‘should not have been allowed to establish himself as an authority, should not be treated respectfully, should not be a professor at a university of high standing.’ McLuhan replied generally in 1967 that ‘anybody who looks at [the book] in a kind of clinical spirit is regarded as hostile, and an enemy of the book’ (‘Dialogue with Stearn’, p. 275). He goes on to state that