Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution [Book Review]

Like Benjamin Franklin's career as a printer, which played an essential role in his successes as a politician, scientist, and author, so too did Mark Twain's intimate knowledge of print culture become the experiential and conceptual foundation for his books. In fascinating and learned detail, Bruce Michelson's Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution tells the story of Twain's journey from youthful printer to publishing-company owner to typesetter investor to subscription-trade entrepreneur to would-be illustrator. While having his hands in virtually every aspect of the printing, advertising, and selling of his books, Twain was also, of course, their author. In chapters ranging from an analysis of Twain's newspaper articles to an account of the print shop in The Mysterious Stranger, #44, Michelson convincingly explains how Twain's identity as author was both produced and compromised in many cases by these other roles. But Michelson does much more than that. He argues that Twain's oftentimes disrupted narratives need to be read as articulations of Twain's attempted liberation from the stifling requirements of print culture, that the publishing industry itself gets figured in the novels as a site where bourgeois values are both disseminated and potentially subverted, and lastly that Twain's self-conscious and self-inflicted metamorphosis into a commodity anticipates contemporary ideas about the death of the author (by Michel Foucault), the significance of the simulacra (by Jean Baudrillard), and the media production of celebrity (by Guy Debord). What is most impressive about Michelson's achievement is his ability to tell synchronically two very different and complicated stories, and to have them speak to one an-other: the first is a macro-narrative about the revolution of publishing in the nineteenth century, and the second is a micro-narrative, with persuasive close readings, about Twain's writings.