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
"Astonishingly capacious and meticulous and, as a material history of print and image reproduction and distribution, [it] is a remarkable achievement."
