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Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
Brief 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 mechanised the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited...
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Hot Type
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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.
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.
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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 mechanised 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 moulded 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 humour 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9798765123959
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 20 August 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Illustration: 1 bw illus
Audience: General / adult, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 36.0mm
Width: 162.0mm
Height: 230.0mm
Weight: 560g
Pages: 384
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.
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