Review: Archie Henderson

Empire of Ink: The printers, rogues, and radicals who invented the American newspaper, by Alex Wright (Basic Books)

Before there was the internet, there was the US Postal Service – the original network where cut-and-paste spread the news long before copy-and-paste ever did.

Alex Wright traces the arc of American newspapers from the 1790s, just after independence, to the late 19th century, when the press swelled to an annual US newspaper circulation totalling 3.6 billion before its slow decline at the most recent turn of a century.

But let’s not go there yet – the history along the way is far too rich to rush.

The American press rested on two pillars: the free-speech guarantee of the US constitution, and two landmark laws that underwrote the rise of the newspaper industry: – the Copyright Act of 1790 and the Post Office Act of 1792. The copyright law granted intellectual property protection to authors of books, maps and charts, but pointedly excluded newspapers.

America’s first generation of legislators saw newspapers less as private property than as a kind of public commons – a town square, vital to civil society. As a result, printers were free to copy, republish, and reprint one another’s work without legal consequence.

Even more consequential was the Post Office Act. In a nation still overwhelmingly rural, the postal system was the connective tissue holding the young republic together. Recognising the role newspapers could play in fostering national unity, Congress granted them extraordinary privileges: a paper could travel up to a hundred miles for a single cent, and a cent and a half beyond that – while a personal letter cost six to 25c.

Newspapers could even exchange copies with one another for free. As a result, editors were rarely short of material in an age of few reporters and barely such a thing as an editor. There was mostly just a printer, who owned the press, and a handful of underpaid “printer’s devils” – ink-stained boys who set type letter by letter and kept the flatbed presses fed. It was dirty work, but the printer needed clean hands for the finer task: cutting items from the stacks of incoming papers, resetting them in type, and perhaps folding in editorialising of his own.

As the nation’s appetite for news grew, publisher Ansel Nash Kellogg – who ran a small paper in a small town – hit a wall when his typesetters left to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Left to fill four pages a week alone, he persuaded the Wisconsin State Journal in nearby Madison, a larger and better-equipped paper, to send him two pages already printed. A new technology known as stereotyping made it possible: a mould of set type, cast in wet papier-mâché, could be shipped cheaply and cast again at the other end. The idea spread. Kellogg patented it, hired armies of “ghost editors”, and effectively invented newspaper syndication.

That same century brought four more transformations: paper from wood pulp, the rotary press, machine typesetting, and advertising.

A French naturalist had observed wasps chewing wood into pulp and wondered whether the same process could be used to make paper. It was this theory Americans exploited to produce it. Previously, old clothes, bandages and linen had been used to make paper.

One entrepreneur even imported Egyptian mummies by the boatload because their wrappings were cheaper than American rags. By 1900 the US, with its vast forests, was generating an estimated 2.5-million tons of paper each year – more than France, Germany and Britain combined.

The paper fed the new rotary presses, patented in 1843 by American engineer Richard Hoe, who refined his machines over the years to take continuous paper feeds until his high-speed web presses were powering mass-circulation papers by the century’s end. Hoe became so dominant a name that the company’s advertising claimed it was “as synonymous for press as Gillette is for razor, Colt for pistol” – and for decades, pressmen simply called any press “a Hoe”.

Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German-born watchmaker working in Baltimore, then patented the Linotype – casting an entire line of type at once, a leap beyond the hand-set letters that had defined printing since Gutenberg. His rival, James Paige, developed a similar compositor machine, and found a passionate backer in Mark Twain. Paige’s machine failed spectacularly, ruining Twain. Mergenthaler’s flourished and by 1954 there would be more than 100,000 Linotypes in operation worldwide.

And then there was advertising – built on patent medicines. These tonics and elixirs, often spiked with alcohol, morphine, or cocaine, thrived in a world with no Food & Drug Administration and no truth-in-advertising laws. Their marketers didn’t simply exploit the newspaper business, they helped invent it, pouring money into ad space decades before soap, cereal, or cars ever thought to.

It is a peculiar irony that the same postal subsidies meant to bind a young democracy together also gave rise to an industry built on wild borrowing, wilder patent-medicine claims, and, eventually, the printed lie dressed up as news. Two-and-a-half centuries later, as another network reshapes how the public scrolls its news – one cent a mile has become nothing but a click – Wright’s history reads less like an artifact than a mirror: same appetite, same speed, same snake oil, only the ink has gone digital.

But the mirror holds up only so far. The 19^th century press, for all its piracy and quackery, still had printers, editors, and a paper trail – someone, however unscrupulous, was accountable for what got set in type. Social media dispensed with the printer altogether, letting the crowd do the cutting and pasting at a speed no stagecoach could match, with no postal clerk to slow it down and no libel-wary editor to catch it first.

And now AI threatens something the syndicates never touched: the writing itself, generated at a scale and cost that makes even Kellogg’s ghost editors look like artisans. The old newspapermen borrowed each other’s words; the new engines don’t need anyone’s words to begin with – they can manufacture the imitation of journalism directly, patent medicine with no tonic in the bottle at all. If the 19th century taught the press to survive being copied, the question now is whether it can survive being replaced.