Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution (review)

In early printing houses, devils were lowest-rung apprentices who did odd-jobs, like pulling sheets from the press and redistributing set type, both of which gave these lads an inky patina. If the devils worked hard, and were receptive to the education senior workers gave them, and were lucky, they might rise to become masters.

Bruce Michelson's Printer's Devil boldly casts Samuel Clemens in this role, while playing upon its meaning. Yes, young Sam was a devil, typographically speaking, as a fetching occupational daguerreotype testifies (6). In it, Clemens looks devilish, too, with a proud glimmer in his eye, and a tromp l'oiel in his hand: his name rendered on a composing stick in defiance of the medium's characteristic image reversal. Such mechanical devilry continued in later life, as seen in his Faustian obsession with perfecting the hopelessly complex Paige typesetter, which cost him his fortune. Had it succeeded in the market it may have bedeviled the compositors whose jobs it would replace and whose unreliable work habits and unpredictable strikes, according to Michelson, contributed to "money-gobbling expenses in getting [Clemens's] own books through the publishing process." (12) There was deviltry in Clemens's writing, too, in its wicked sarcasm, personae manipulations (the pseudonymous "Mark Twain" may have been his greatest invention), and deft language use, treacherous to the naive and gullible, the too-innocent and overly precious.

And there were literal devils in Twain's writing. Perhaps the most telling occurs in his "Mysterious Stranger," set in a fifteenth-century print shop frequented by an all-seeing, if nihilistic stranger, oddly enough named Satan, who edifies the workers with the startling conclusion that nothing is real but the narrator's "Thought, 'Wandering forlorn among the empty eternities'" (218). Michelson reads this "Mark Twain dream of Samuel Clemens," in transit from printer's devil to media mogul to inefficacious "public identity," as "contrived and promulgated with printed language that inevitable alienates and objectifies the dream" (220, 223). Coming to consciousness of these slippery ontological slopes of the printed page, the narrator avers the truth of nothingness beyond the thought and appropriately ends the story.

Michelson's dazzling display of such cultural poetics throughout his book is thought provoking. It quickly dispels any suspicion that perhaps printing, whether as initial inspiration, shaping influence, or simple synecdoche, was not as central to Clemens as Michelson claims. Much to the author's credit, the reader wants it to be so, even if he or she should know better.

Take the phrase "American publishing revolution," for example. It is key to Michelson's argument, not only concerning the centrality of print, but for his many attempts to link that media revolution with today's. Yet was there such a revolution? No other scholars have used the phrase, and with good reason: there was little revolutionary about such old media probably at any time in American history, but especially during Clemens's adulthood, when the publishing industry struggled mightily to survive. The "American publishing revolution" thus resembles one of those substance-less thoughts albeit, with textually constitutive power, to which the Mysterious Stranger alludes. Jettisoning that thought might diminish the book's contemporary relevance only to highlight the chaotic publishing environment, limned well by Michelson, out of which printer-devil Clemens rose to become Twain, the exceedingly devilish master writer.