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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 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Quills to Keys | Writing Superseded | The Typewriter's Impact | Copy | Enter the Muse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
About the author
Jeff Jarvis
