Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
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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. 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.
Table of Contents
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Quills to Keys | Writing Superseded | The Typewriter's Impact | Copy | Enter the Muse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
Product details
| Published | 11 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 336 |
| ISBN | 9798765123966 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 1 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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