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Hot Type

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What to expect

Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
Written and read by Jeff Jarvis

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.

Critics Review

Jarvis pens a colorful and enthralling portrait of Gilded Age industrial ferment, replete with ingenious inventors wrangling with impatient investors, and a rich analysis of humanity's love-hate relationship with technological expansion. Readers will be rapt.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Andrew Pettegree, Wardlaw Professor of History, University of St. Andrews, UK
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.
Sarah Bull, Associate Professor of English, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
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.
Katherine M. Ruffin, Director of the Book Studies Program and Senior Lecturer in Art, Wellesley College, USA
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.
Kirkus Reviews
Author Jeff Jarvis
Narrator Jeff Jarvis
Duration 11 hours and 15 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9798216477341
Format Audiobook
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre History of engineering and technology, History of ideas, Media, entertainment, information and communication industries, Typography and lettering
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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