Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing RevolutionTrained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity. Printer’s Devil is the first book to explore these themes in some of Mark Twain's best-known literary works, and in his most daring speculations—on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Mark Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces—for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Mark Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain’s writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Mark Twain’s life and art, amid this media revolution, is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change: for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness. |
Contents
| 1 | |
The Mischief of the Press | 52 |
But Now Everybody Goes Everywhere | 77 |
Huckleberry Finn and the American Print Revolution | 119 |
Mark Twain and the Information Age | 164 |
Mark Twain for the Next Fifteen Minutes | 224 |
Notes | 243 |
Bibliography | 275 |
Permissions | 287 |
Index | 291 |
Other editions - View all
Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution Bruce Michelson Limited preview - 2006 |
Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution Bruce Michelson Limited preview - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
American publishing artist Berkeley California Press Chapter chromos Clemens Clemens's Company Connecticut Yankee copies cultural Diary discourse dream E. D. Morel edition Edmund Dene Morel electrotype encounter engravings exploit Gilded Age handpress Hannibal Harpers Huck Huck's narrative Huckleberry Finn illustrations images imaginative industry Innocents Abroad interview Journal kind King Leopold's King Leopold's Soliloquy Linotype literary Literature London Louis machine magazines Mark Twain Mark Twain's Letters Missouri modern Morel movable type Mysterious Stranger newspaper nineteenth century novel Orion Paige paper photographs printed word printer production Pudd'nhead Wilson readers Sam Clemens satire Sawyer sheet Shelley Fisher Fishkin Stedman story supposedly tale telling tion Tom Sawyer tourist trade Tramp Abroad travel book turn typesetting University of California University Press verbal text visual experience Webster WebsterCo Weekly writing York young
Popular passages
Page 65 - And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications...
Page 59 - That's it exactly. You see, we were twins — defunct and I — and we got mixed in the bathtub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill. Some think it was me.
Page 123 - Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watchguard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd 'a...
Page 142 - But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off...
Page 239 - The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here...
Page 176 - That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
Page 108 - Animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about that ; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I never knew but one man who could. I knew he could, however, because he told me so himself. He was a middle-aged, simple-hearted miner who had lived in a lonely corner of California, among the woods and mountains, a good many years, and had studied the ways of his only neighbors, the beasts and the birds, until he believed he could accurately translate any...
Page 57 - I can easily imagine it. But about this interview. You know it is the custom, now, to interview any man who has become notorious.