Hot Type : The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad / Jeff Jarvis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jarvis, Jeff, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mergenthaler, Ottmar, 1854-1899.

Mergenthaler, Ottmar.

Linotype--History.

Linotype.

Printing--History.

Printing.

Typesetting machines--History.

Typesetting machines.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (376 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing (US), 2026.

System Details:

text file rdaft

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: The Art Preservative of All Arts Typothetae Personae 1 – The Missing Machine Enter Mark Twain | Media’s New Machinery | In the New Word Factories | Gilding the Age 2 – The Type-writer Quills to Keys | Writing Superseded | The Typewriter’s Impact | Copy | Enter the Muse 3 – Failures Come First The Tasks to Be Accomplished | Twain’s Folly | Ruin and Rescue 4 – A Line of Type Mergenthaler Meets His Muse | Ottmar Mergenthaler | First, a Few More Failures | Eureka! | The Matrix | A Founder to the Rescue | All Together Now | The Linotype Arrives 5 – Capital Enter the Villain | The Syndicate | Divorce | Linotype 1.0 | Mergenthaler’s Ends 6 – Mass Media Success | The Measure of Mass | Papers’ Profit | Magazines Make Mass | Books and Best-Sellers 7 – The Mergenthaler Linotype Company Millions of Matrices | Inside the Alphabet Factory 8 – Labor and the Linotype Big Six and the International Typographical Union | Gender, Race, and Type | The Swifts | Enter the Linotype 9 – Cold Type Threats | Enter the Computer | Wapping 10 – Postscript Out of Sorts | Melt-Down | At the End | PostScript | Free Type | 11 – Coda Twain | Mergenthaler and His Linotype Afterword: A Typographical Autobiography Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index

ISBN:

9798765123980

OCLC:

1592884160