Printer's Devil Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution

Mark Twain often thought about typeset words as powerful forces. He wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power. Studying these themes in Mark Twain's writings, this work also offers an overview of technological changes that transformed American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime.

"In this fascinating study, we see a great 19th-century writer grappling with such 21st-century concerns as the challenge of authenticity in a world of ubiquitous duplication, the meaning authorship in an age of celebrity, the role of words and texts in a world ceaselessly bombarded by visual images, and the struggle to simultaneously exploit and contain the power of new technologies. Michelson sets Twain's often playful interrogation in fiction of new cultural forms such as the interview or the "chromo" against the backdrop of changes in publishing and print media that brought these forms into existence. Printer's Devil will interest anyone who cares about Mark Twain or the history of print culture in America."—Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

" A major contribution to Mark Twain studies and, more broadly, to an understanding of American culture."—Gregg Camfield, author of The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain

Trained 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.