Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
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Hot Type
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Jeff Jarvis
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.
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Critic reviews
Jeff Jarvis has the knack of choosing the right moment and the right subject, and nowhere is this more evident than in this captivating book. He argues persuasively that the steam press, telegraph, and photography were only partly responsible for the great nineteenth-century transformations in communication technology: without the means to speed the process of composition of text there could be no mass media. Linotype was the solution, but only after many alarms and excursions, beautifully
expounded in this superb book.
expounded in this superb book.
Hot Type offers a vivid portrait of the quest to speed up typesetting in an age of mechanical invention, and what the Linotype’s introduction meant for the publishing industry. From Mark Twain’s toddler daughter to members of the International Typographical Union, this book tells a story about people and their relationships with machines that shows why narratives of mass media’s emergence must account for the Linotype.
Jeff Jarvis tells a complex story in a lively journalistic fashion. From the nuts and bolts of the machines to the personalities and motivations of key figures, this engaging story conveys details drawn from a wide
range of sources. Hot Type makes a valuable contribution to the literature of the history of printing and mass media in America.
range of sources. Hot Type makes a valuable contribution to the literature of the history of printing and mass media in America.
The telegraph, wire services, offset lithography, the birth of typographical unions, the challenges women and Black Americans had in entering the industry—Jarvis covers it all in this immensely readable work. He also has a witty way of presenting history … A fascinating history of print’s evolution.
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