Hot Type
The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
- Publisher's listprice GBP 17.99
-
8 122 Ft (7 735 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 20% (cc. 1 624 Ft off)
- Discounted price 6 497 Ft (6 188 Ft + 5% VAT)
- Discount is valid until: 30 June 2026
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
8 122 Ft
Availability
Not yet published.
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 20 August 2026
- ISBN 9798765123959
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages384 pages
- Size 228.6x152.4 mm
- Language
- Illustrations 1 bw illus 700
Categories
Short description:
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.
MoreLong 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 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
