HOT TYPE
The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
by Jeff Jarvis
The story of a revolution in printing and the evaporation of Mark Twain’s fortune.
Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was the standard way of impressing letters onto a page for 400 years until German-born watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler came along. Gutenberg’s machine could mold a text only one letter at a time; Mergenthaler’s Linotype could mold an entire line at a time in hot metal with its “troop of idiosyncratically shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels.” In this book, Jarvis (The Gutenberg Parenthesis, 2023) celebrates Mergenthaler’s achievement and documents its role in creating today’s mass media. He describes failed attempts to create a typesetting machine before highlighting success stories, from Mergenthaler’s Linotype to Steve Jobs’ Mac. The book is also the tragic tale of Twain, who blew a bundle—$7 million in today’s money—on a would-be Linotype competitor: the Paige Compositor, a “gargantuan metal monster” that “resembles an unfinished or perhaps vandalized steam locomotive.” Jarvis cites other notables of this era, from Christopher Latham Sholes, widely credited with inventing the typewriter; to Horace Greeley, “a pioneering advocate of American socialism,” who founded the New York Tribune in 1841; to Whitelaw Reid, who “stole Greeley’s newspaper out from under him” and turned it into “a pragmatic testament to conservative culture, institutional power, and capitalism powered by technology.” 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. When noting Sholes’ efforts, he writes that, in one iteration, paper was wrapped around a platen, with letters progressing around the roller rather than along its length. The problem? “Because the type struck the paper from beneath, it was impossible for the typist to see what was being typed. Thus was born the typo.”
A fascinating history of print’s evolution.