Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Hot Type is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.
This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.
The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Linotype machine, an 1886 invention that mechanized and vastly sped up the setting of type to print newspapers and books, sparked an explosion of printed content while stirring fears of unemployment and dehumanizing technology, according to this wide-ranging history from journalist Jarvis (The Web We Weave). Invented by German American engineer Ottmar Mergenthaler, the Linotype used a typewriter-like keyboard and a tiny foundry to cast whole lines of text from molten metal. Jarvis presents a perceptive study in technological change: although thousands of typesetters were initially laid off, the ensuing publishing boom ended up employing many more Linotype operators (until computers killed the profession off). Still, the proud, centuries-old culture of hand typesetting—including typesetting races held in front of paying audiences of thousands—withered. The book's presiding spirit is humorist Mark Twain, an ex-typesetter who went bankrupt backing a rival to the Linotype. Twain's unfinished final novel, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, features a demonic typesetting shop with what seems to Jarvis like an invisible Linotype. Jarvis pens a colorful and enthralling portrait of Gilded Age industrial ferment, replete with ingenious inventors wrangling with impatient investors, and a rich analysis of humanity's love-hate relationship with technological expansion. Readers will be rapt.
