This paper aims to investigate the predominant role of children's literature in implanting the works of Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan. In particular, Lewis Carroll's nonsense works, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, provide McLuhan with keys to interpreting the contemporary and analyzing reality also from a pedagogical perspective. Also suggested is the hypothesis that McLuhan himself made use of pedagogical "devices" (even a deck of cards with seeds and quotations with which he alluded to educational play), particularly the picturebook, whose peculiarities were exploited to produce one of his best-known works, The Medium is the Massage. In this contribution we review the numerous references to Carroll, but also to Joyce, two authors beloved by McLuhan and, in a sense, juxtaposed: in this way the work defined as "for children" becomes a work of literature tout court and, conversely, the most complex work of 20th-century literature lends itself to a "child" reading.