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

By Jeff Jarvis

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FQ6538JB
• ISBN13: 9798765123959
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"