Washington Irving, Ruth Anna Fisher, and Linotype History: August Books Roundup
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad by Jeff Jarvis
Our ongoing look at new books that have recently caught the eye of our print and online editors this month.
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad by Jeff Jarvis
A very readable history of print's evolution through the typesetting machines, especially Ottmar Mergenthaler's 19th century creation, that mechanized the process of setting type letter by letter and resulted in a publishing revolution and financial disaster for Mark Twain. From Bloomsbury.
A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer by Phillip Lopate
Literary critic and native New Yorker Lopate looks at the often underrated genre-crossing writer via a series of essays on his writings including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle as well as focusing on Irving's life. Princeton University Press.
Jean Toomer: Writer for a New America by George Hutchinson
The latest in Yale University Press's Black Lives series, this biography of the influential Harlem Renaissance writer and author of Cane (1923) Jean Toomer examines his remarkable life from his search for Cosmic Consciousness to his battles against racism.
Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past by Eva Mroczek
Also from Yale is this history of the loss and recovery of religious texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Zohar,
Envoy to the Archives: Ruth Anna Fisher and Hidden Transatlantic History by William L. Fox
The first full-length biography of the hugely successful manuscript librarian who was the London-based agent of the US Library of Congress, and responsible for a huge program of identifying and copying documents related to American history and the transatlantic slave trade. Fox, who knew Fisher personally, draws on archival sources, including the personal papers of prominent Black thinkers and various institutional records at the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press in its African American Intellectual History series.
