| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Michelson. Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution. (Simpson Imprint in Humanities.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 299. $34.95.
Nearly 100 years after the death of his creator, Mark Twain remains one of the most enduring cultural icons in American literary history. Author, storyteller, adventurer, iconoclast, and humorist, the character created by Samuel Clemens remains the subject of countless one-man stage shows and a vast scholarly literature. His best-known work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, is often described as a "great American novel."	1
But Twain's fame is only partly due to the writing talents of Clemens, according to Bruce Michelson. Michelson, the author of Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self (1995), argues that Twain became a modern literary celebrity primarily through Clemens's determined exploitation of nineteenth-century changes in printing technologies that allowed him to promote Twain's works through mass produced and distributed books, magazines, and newspapers.	2
Clemens became fascinated with printing as a young man, beginning with an apprenticeship in 1847 to a four-page weekly newspaper produced with handset type, rough paper, and a flatbed press. The printing process at that time was fundamentally unchanged from that imported to the American colonies from Europe two hundred years before. But new inventions and industrialization already were transforming technologies of communications. Michelson points to at least seventy decisive inventions and patents directly related to printing and publishing that were granted between 1830 and 1855.	. . .

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