Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
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Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

B2Upper-intermediateAugust 20, 202655 min

Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) 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 w...

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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Rhonda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast, Jeff Jarvis, to tell us about his latest book published with Bloomsbury in 2026 titled Hot Type, The

0:21

Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Massed Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad. Obviously, title tells us we're going to have a lot of things to talk about in this conversation. Things that combine machinery, technology, and moving from sort of the Gutenberg press type things closer to where we're at now. But we're also going to be talking about kind

0:43

of what that technology does more broadly, right? There's economics involved, there's kind of social change, there's the implications for the people involved in publication, the who set the type, for instance, I'm sure will come up, and of course, authors and readers too.

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