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

About the Book

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.

Table 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Quills to Keys | Writing Superseded | The Typewriter’s Impact | Copy | Enter the Muse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 is the Emeritus Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, a visiting professor at Stony Brook University, and a fellow at Montclair State University's Center for Cooperative Media. He was the 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.com and cohosts the podcasts AI Inside, Intelligent Machines, and Breaking the News. He is the author of six books, including The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023) and Magazine (2023), both published by Bloomsbury.

Review :

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.

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.

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.