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• ↓ Sam Clemens, compositor
• ↓ Introducing my book ‘Hot Type’
• ↓ Words matter. Damnit.
• ↓ AI Communism
• ↓ California’s squandered opportunity
• ↓ Top Alternatives to buzzmachine.com

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"With the publication of my new book, Hot Type, I’m sharing brief excerpts to give you a sense of the stories in it. Mark Twain is the Zelig of the tale, reentering often, as if a tour guide. Here, he comes on stage as Samuel Clemens, a young printer’s devil working in his brother’s Hannibal newspaper before hitting the road as a tramp printer. This is my way to explain the job, the craft — the art, some would say — of setting type. Following this in the book is an account of the tremendous technological innovations in publishing — steam-powered presses, stereotyping, the telegraph — that Sam saw in this period, all of which will lead the way to the Linotype. But you won’t find that here. You’ll have to buy the book ."

"In 1847, at age eleven, a fatherless Samuel Clemens begged his mother to let him leave school to work. Two years later, after Sam’s teacher decamped Missouri to join the California Gold Rush, Jane Clemens relented and allowed her son to undertake an apprenticeship at Joseph Ament’s Missouri Courier in Hannibal. He worked as a printer’s devil — composing room dogsbody — for no pay, only food, board, education in the trade, and the promise of two suits. Sam slept on the floor of the office above Brittingham’s Drugstore and received just one suit, a too-large hand￾me-down from the too-large publisher, which “gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent.”"

"After serving two years, Sam went to work in the Hannibal Journal, a paper bought and run by his brother Orion. It was a dreadful weekly blatt filled with endless transcripts of boring speeches, treacly serialized fiction, and random, useless items passing for news: an inch of snow in St. Louis the week before, a robbery a state away in Illinois, how many brooms orphans manufactured daily in Cincinnati (twenty dozen). In Sam Wheeler, Detective, Sam the author described a village paper that might as well have been his brother’s."

"It was a wretchedly printed little sheet, being very vague and pale in spots, and in other spots so caked with ink as to be hardly decipherable. The first column was occupied by “Original Poetry” of the sappiest description. The next four were occupied by a selected story which was as sappy as the poetry. The remaining column of this first page was made up of short paragraphs of vapid, heart-breaking, infuriating rot entitled “Wit and Humor.” The other outside page was built wholly of advertisements: three columns consisted mainly of glorified quack-poisons . . . headed with blurred portraits of the assassins who invented the nostrums, and tailed with lying testimonials from people who had never existed; the two remaining columns were thrown into one, which sang the praises of “Bagley’s Celebrated One-Price Emporium” in riotous display-lines of forty-line pica shot full of shouting exclamation points."

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Sam Clemens, compositor

Introducing my book ‘Hot Type’

Words matter. Damnit.

AI Communism

California’s squandered opportunity