Alex Wright's Empire of Ink serves as a vital reminder of why the print medium matters and how its history still influences people's behavior. He presents that history in context with how a sprawling, disconnected collection of colonies evolved into the singular, if argumentative, United States.
The narrative begins with the persuasive premise that the United States existed as a rebellion on paper long before the first shots of the revolutionary war. The colonies were already connected by a chaotic web of broadsides and pamphlets comprising the infrastructure of dissent. Wright highlights how the early postal system, which carried newspapers at a subsidized rate, functioned as the first social network, enabling the flow of information and allowing a scattered, agrarian population to imagine themselves as a coherent entity.
The physical reality of this revolution was rooted in gritty, industrial processes that Wright (Cataloging the World; Glut) explores with riveting thoroughness. He examines the material progression of the medium, moving from the labor-intensive maceration of linen and cotton rags (and even the use of mummy wrappings) to the eventual dominance of wood pulp. He details the shift from agonizingly slow hand-operated wooden presses--a technology that had barely advanced since Gutenberg--to the arrival of the steam-powered rotary press.
The U.S. ink-stained heritage is filled with individual architects who leveraged the press to influence the national consciousness. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, is portrayed as the quintessential printer-prophet who used the Pennsylvania Gazette as a tool for civic engineering, and later, Frederick Douglass's North Star proved that the printing press was a potent weapon for the disenfranchised to claim their place in the republic.
Wright tracks a persistent divergence into two competing threads that defined the national print character as the industry matured. On one hand, there was the rise of the industrial titans, the consolidated mass media machines of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who transformed news into a high-volume, high-profit commodity. It was a unifying force, though one that often prioritized sensationalism over nuance in its quest for total market dominance. Parallel to these giants was and is the persistent heartbeat of the independent press, a thread that represented print as a tool for those the industrial machine ignored. From abolitionist papers and suffrage circulars to the gritty underground zines of later eras, these independent voices provided a necessary counterweight to the mainstream narrative.
Ultimately, Wright has written an immersive appreciation for the permanence of the printed word in an increasingly ephemeral world, reminding readers that the foundations of American democracy were laid down as impressions on a press. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: Empire of Ink is a masterful work of historical exposition that serves as a vital reminder of why the print medium matters.