"The Most Beautiful Book"

Abstract

About 1890, as everybody knows, in Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain lost his shirt. He had been taking money out of a publishing business that flourished to invest in a business that promised to flourish still more luxuriantly, one built around a scheme for setting type much faster than it could be set by hand, and the scheme failed. It did not fail through dependence on an undeveloped technology. Facilities to machine the identical iron fingers that should obsolesce the typesetter's had existed since the American Civil War in the small arms industry; it was in the Colt plant in Hartford that Twain's man did his fruitless work. Nor was the project inherently bizarre. Typesetter stock was the computer stock of those days; smart money like Twain's was looking for a future Texas Instruments, a future IBM. As it happened, the coming giants of the industry had already declared themselves. Ottmar Mergenthaler received his first patent in 1885, to cover the operating principles of what would become the linotype machine. Two years later Tolbert Lanston had a patent for his monotype, which took its instructions from perforated paper like a Jacquard Loom. By 1890 there were typesetting machines in operation as far afield as England. Reading matter was being mass produced on the scale on which Henry Ford would one day mass produce automobiles; the three-volume novel at 31/6 gave way to the single-decker at 6s, compact enough to slip into an overcoat pocket and read on a suburban train. Books had become timekillers for the railway journeys on which middle-class commuters were spending much of their time, and the flourishing bookstalls were the ones located in railway stations. And the sheets of copy that hung in front of the men who sat at typesetting keyboards were themselves apt to be typewritten. Typewriters also used small-arms technology; the first machine with a shift-key for both upperand lower-case letters, 1878, bore the name of Remington, the rifle-makers. It was one of these that Enid Layard, daughter-in-law of Lady Charlotte Guest who had translated Tennyson's source-book the Mabinogion, gave to her