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Hot Type is the 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. The technology helped transform Mark Twain into a premier literary celebrity, but also cost him his fortune -- as well as his sense of humor and optimism. The Linotype''s era 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. 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. The Linotype would die at the hands of the computer, taking down with it printers'' unions and many a newspaper. Its history provides an opportunity to examine the impact of technology on culture just as new technologies-the internet and artificial intelligence-manufacture their endless streams of words today.
List of contents
Introduction: The Art Preservative of All ArtsTypothetae Personae1 - The Missing MachineEnter Mark Twain | Media's New Machinery | In the New Word Factories | Gilding the Age | Twain in the China Shop
2 - The Type-writer Quills to Keys | Writing superseded | The Typewriter's Impact | Copy | Enter the Muse
3 - Failures Come FirstThe Tasks to be Done | Twain's Folly | Ruin and Salvation
4 - A Line of TypeMergenthaler Meets His Muse | Ottmar Mergenthaler | First, a Few More Failures | Eureka! | A Founder to the Rescue | All Together Now | The Linotype Arrives
5 - CapitalEnter the Villain | The Syndicate | Divorce | Linotype 1.0 | Mergenthaler's Ends
6 - Mass MediaSuccess | Speed, Savings, Size, and Scale | The Commodification of Content | Corporate Media | Papers' Profit | Magazines Make Mass | Books and Best-Sellers
7 - The Mergenthaler Linotype CompanyMillions of Matrices | Inside the Alphabet Factory
8 - Labor and the LinotypeThe Swifts | Big Six and the International Typographical Union | Gender, Race, and Type | Enter the Linotype
9 - Cold TypeThreats | Enter the Computer | Wapping
10 - PostscriptOut of Sorts | Melt-Down | At the End | PostScript | Free Type | Coda: Twain | Coda: Mergenthaler and his Linotype
Afterword: A Typographical AutobiographyBibliographyIndexColophon
About the author
Jeff Jarvis holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine, cohosts the podcast This Week in Google, and is the author of five books: What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014), and Magazine (2023) in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.
