|
|
books
| book details |
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad
By (author) Prof Jeff Jarvis
|
|
| on special |
normal price: R 731.95
Price: R 658.95
|
| book 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.
| product details |
Normally shipped |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published date | 23 Jul 2026
Language |
Format | Hardback
Pages | 336
Dimensions | 229 x 152 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 979-8-7651-2395-9
Readership Age |
BISAC | literary criticism / books & reading
| other options |
|
|
To view the items in your trolley please sign in.
| sign in |
|
|
|
| specials |
|
An epic love story with the pulse of a thriller that asks: what would you risk for a second chance at first love?
|
|
Mason Coile
Paperback / softback
224 pages
was: R 520.95
now: R 468.95
|
A terrifying locked-room mystery set in a remote outpost on Mars.
|
|
|
|
|
|
