“Reality is a very subjective affair”*…
As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…
…The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist.
As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”
For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.
“Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality.
“If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
“Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.”
Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.
For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.”
As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”
That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”
Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.
Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”
* Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
###
As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.
Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.
“I wisely started with a map”*…
From Daniel O’Donohue, 29 print-ready folding globe templates (the one above is “Earth Today”; there are also globes of the sun, the moon, the planets, and lots of different “views” of Earth) — every one free to download, print, and fold, and every one customizable into other shapes or create your own, with your own pinned places. via the custom globe builder…
… This project started with a simple observation: we look at maps on screens all day, but almost nobody gets to hold a planet. A paper globe is the cheapest possible spacecraft — print a sheet, cut along the lines, fold, glue, and you are turning the actual shape of the world over in your hands.
Nothing here is decoration. Every globe is built from openly licensed scientific data — NASA satellite imagery, USGS planetary mosaics, Natural Earth cartography, NOAA ocean data, the Smithsonian’s volcano inventory — rendered through real map projections into print-quality PDFs. Each globe credits its source, and the source is always one click away.
The fold shapes are the classics of mathematical cartography: icosahedra, dodecahedra, gores like a 17th-century globemaker would cut, even the Airocean projection that unfolds the world onto twenty triangles with barely any distortion.
The curated globes are free — print as many as you like. When you want a globe that is yours alone — your places pinned, your countries highlighted, your choice of shape — the builder is where it happens…
Getting our minds– and out hands– around the places we are: “Folding Globes.”
Harmonic: “24 Times,” from Gysin-Vanetti: “A collection of twentyfour variations on the theme “clock” created for HeK… Each of these clocks shows time in a distinct form. The result is a sequence of numbers, letters or punctuation marks animated in different ways….”
* J. R. R. Tolkien
###
As we orient ourselves, we might spare a thought for William John McGee (or “WJ McGee, without the periods, as he referred to himself); he died on this date in 1912. An inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, he is remembered for his pioneering studies documenting the occurrence of waves of invasions and recessions of ice sheets in North America (thus establishing the complexity of the Great Ice Age). But he worked in a number of governmental and organizational capacities that contributed to teh development of geography as a discipline: e.g., as a director in the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a founder and president of the National Geographic Society. While on the staff of the Bureau of Soils, in 1918, he organized the landmark Conference of Governors on Conservation of Natural Resources, for whihc he has been called the “chief theorist of the conservation movement.”
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently”*…
It can feel, as we’re awash in the wave of “news” and “dialogue” about AI that dominates discourse these days, as though artificial intelligence sprang onto the scene with more development up its sleeve but, Athena-like, essentially fully grown.
Writing on the Internet Archive’s blog, Jason Scott introduces a new collection at the Archive that reminds us that AI’s had a childhood (e.g., ELIZA) and an adolescence (e.g., work by and inspired by Seymour Papert), and that we can learn from it…
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum’s Universal Robots [and here] (or Tik-Tok, the Royal Army of Oz), through countless science-fiction properties and incredibly positive futurist home-making advertisements, and into the inevitable portrayal of dark and dystopian empires providing humans with nothing but a clear and present ending to their story arc. Artificial Intelligence has been riding along with humanity’s storytelling and expressiveness for many generations – and, one might argue, it is this ever-present influence and inspiration that has driven a lot of the modern phrasing and design in our most contemporary toys and tools wearing the vestments of consciousness.
The motivations are clear: our endless curiosity of the nature of our minds and humanity, the twists and turns that come when the synthetic mirror-images of people betray unintended consequences, and the fact that human beings look amazing when rendered in chrome.
But before we get swept up too much into the echoes of the past and see patterns of AI-like entities into the distant generations (golems, anyone?) let us instead zoom into a very specific family of projects and products that are presented at the Internet Archive for the research, education, and enjoyment of all: The newly-minted Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection.
Dating roughly from the 1970s through the 1990s, these emulated software packages have come from many sources, and with many motivations, but have been curated together for a very subtle and occasionally imperceptible theme: the adventure of experiencing a machine that thinks.
To be clear, and without taking too much time for a press conference announcing so or claiming such for a future IPO, none of the programs in this collection come within a solar system of thinking in any actual sense. They are, instead, portrayals on microcomputers and game consoles of the idea of thinking machines, the experience of creating autonomous or semi-autonomous virtual entities, and playing games with the illusion of a contemplative and improvisational opponent…
Eminently worth reading in full. The early days of AI: “Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward,” from @textfiles.com and @archive.org.
Given that the original users of/audiences for most those vintage programs presumably skewed young (in keeping with the demographics of recreational pc use), it’s fascinating to note, in the results of a recent Pew survey, that “for the first time, a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI,” a rate on par with adults 65+ and (for the time) higher than that level of concern adults 30-49 (51%) or adults 50-64 (47%). As to why…
Even in 2021, job loss was one of the top reasons behind Americans’ concern about AI. Today, Americans largely – and increasingly – think AI-related job loss is on the horizon.
In our new survey, 71% of adults think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the United States over the next two decades, up from 64% in 2024. Few (5%) say AI will lead to more jobs. One-in-ten say it won’t make much difference, and a slightly larger share are unsure…
… Adults under 30 are most likely to think AI will be bad for society – and for them. They largely think it will make connection and creativity harder to come by. And though most say they use chatbots, they’re just as likely to say these tools hurt their own creativity as help it… – source
* Fyodor Dostoevsky
###
As we reminisce, we might recall that it was on this date in 1833 that The Sun began publication in New York City. It was the first successful penny daily newspaper in the United States; and for a time, the most successful newspaper in the U.S.
[The Sun was] popular with the city’s less affluent, working classes. Its publisher, Benjamin H. Day, emphasized local events, police court reports, and sports in his four-page morning newspaper. Advertisements, notably help-wanted ads, were plentiful. By 1834, the Sun had the largest circulation in the United States. Its rising popularity was attributed to its readers’ passion for the Sun‘s sensational and sometimes fabricated stories [c.f., for example, here] and the paper’s exaggerated coverage of sundry scandals. Its success was also the result of the efforts of the city’s ubiquitous newsboys, who the innovative Day had hired to hawk the paper. The Sun added a Saturday edition in 1836. A number of weekly and semiweekly titles were also published, such as the Weekly Sun (1851-69), which shares the same masthead as the Sun with “Weekly” appearing in the title ornament.
The paper’s true glory days began in 1868 when Charles A. Dana, former managing editor of the New York Tribune, became part owner and editor. Dana endeavored to apply the art of literary craftsmanship to the news. Under him, the Sun became known as “the newspaperman’s newspaper,” featuring editorials, society news, and human-interest stories. A Sunday edition was added in 1875 and, later, a Saturday supplement appeared, offering book notices, essays, and fictional sketches by Bret Harte, Henry James, and other well-known writers. In the 1880s, the paper’s size increased to eight pages and in 1887 the Evening Sun hit the streets in two editions: Wall Street and Night
On September 21, 1897, in response to a letter from eight-year-old reader Virginia O’Hanlon (“Papa says ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”), the paper published “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” This opinion piece by veteran newspaperman Francis P. Church, insisting that Santa Claus “exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” caused an immediate sensation. It became one of the most famous editorials in newspaper publishing history; the Sun would reprint this editorial annually until 1949… – source
“The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around”*…
Your correspondent will on the road for the next several days, so (R)D will be on hiatus until on or around September 3. Meantime, a seasonally-appropriate post…
Writing for Texas Monthly, Lauren Larson visits Reddy Ice, the largest producer of packaged ice in North America and it’s CEO, Lonny Warner, to explore a billion-dollar industry that’s essential to us all, but that few of us stop to ponder…
… Warner joins a long procession of icemen who have bemoaned the lack of interest in their trade. “We are so familiar with water in its liquid and its solid form, that we seldom think of it as a mineral, and still less as a mineral product of any considerable industrial importance,” wrote W. P. Blake, an American geologist and mining consultant, in an 1883 report on the country’s ice trade. And yet, he wrote, “the industry is peculiarly American, and in no other country has the business of cutting and storing ice been so well systematized and perfected.”
By the time of Blake’s findings, people had been experimenting with making and keeping ice for centuries. In India, possibly as early as three thousand years ago, people used clay pots to cool water: The water’s evaporation through the clay removed heat, leaving chilled water or even ice under the right conditions. The technique is still used, especially as the country experiences record heat waves.
Americans in the nineteenth century, the dawn of the modern ice industry, had it easier. “The natural supply of ice in the United States is almost beyond calculation,” wrote a U.S. census agent named Henry Hall in a report submitted in 1883. Since at least 1805 so-called natural ice had been harvested from northern lakes, rivers, and ponds in a process accurately and musically depicted in the opening scene of Frozen, a rare cinematic nod to the ice industry. (In Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 play, The Iceman Cometh, a salesman has told his alcoholic friends that his wife is at home with the iceman. The iceman in question is meant to evoke death—the woman has been killed—but anxieties around swole deliverymen entering homes and seducing wives seem to have been prevalent in the twentieth century.) Using long handsaws and a variety of improvised plows, Northerners would cut grids in the ice and remove blocks, which were then stored or sent to warmer locales by ship or rail in insulated containers.
Thanks to a man named Frederic Tudor, some of these destinations were quite far-flung. Tudor was a merchant from Boston, more mutton chop than man in his later years. He would ship natural ice from Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which is startlingly Whole Foods–y branding for the nineteenth century.
Tudor envisioned a global ice industry. Perhaps he was motivated by the limited market for his Gläce-priced ice blocks in the U.S. or by the prevalence elsewhere of tropical fevers such as yellow fever, as the symptoms of these were often soothed by cold water. (In 1851 a doctor named John Gorrie experimented with creating a cold sickroom for malaria patients’ high fevers, effectively inventing air-conditioning.) In 1806, Tudor attempted to ship blocks of ice to the island of Martinique, a speculation that is detailed by Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, in Refrigeration Nation, one of three books he’s written about refrigeration. First, the owner of a boat Tudor had chartered got cold feet, convinced, as many shipowners were, that the ice would melt and sink the ship. Tudor chartered another ship and successfully delivered his wares to the island, but Martinique had no icehouse in which to store it, and it began to melt, as ice does. Customers also had no idea how to transport it from his hold to their homes or keep it cold once they did; Tudor advised them to wrap their purchases in cloth. “He still got complaints, since it melted anyway,” writes Rees.
Tudor could very well have gone down in history as the father of the modern Potemkin start-up rather than the father of the modern ice industry, but he persevered. He saw that in order to create the worldwide ice trade he envisioned, he would have to build a global network of icehouses. Eventually his empire grew vast, and historians call Tudor by the absolutely sick moniker the Ice King…
… By the mid to late nineteenth century, artificial ice makers were being invented across the globe. Texans—perhaps shaken by the Civil War, which hindered the shipment of ice, and also likely motivated by the state’s growing beef industry—were aggressive in the ice race. By 1867, notes Rees, when the United States had only eight ice plants, three existed in San Antonio. Some early refrigeration machines used compressed ammonia, which is still widely used as a coolant. In the coming decades, ice plants bloomed across the state like frost on a window.
In the late 1920s, Southland Ice Company had eight plants and 21 retail locations in Texas, from which it provided ice for the iceboxes of residents in surrounding areas. (Widespread adoption of refrigerators was still several decades away and was driven, Rees tells me, by the lure of ice in the home. “The argument was always, ‘Get rid of the iceman. Buy a refrigerator.’ ”) Southland eventually became Southland Ice Corporation, and its icehouses, which had grown into convenience stores called Tote’ms, were rechristened 7-Elevens. In 1972, as 7-Eleven was growing into the brand that would stain the lips of countless middle schoolers with its neon Slurpees, Southland rebranded its large ice operation, calling it Reddy Ice Division.
Reddy was not yet the acquisitive ice empire it is today. For most of the twentieth century, regional producers thrived. But then, in the early nineties, the packaged-ice industry encountered an innovation: the in-store bagger. Refrigerator ice makers already existed but were not a particularly virile threat, as it would take a long time for a refrigerator-door ice maker to fill a cooler. In-store ice baggers were a different story.
The machines had been perfected by a young man named Jim Stuart, a former accountant who had consulted for a company called Automatic Ice Machine, or A.I.M. Inspired by that work, he began selling what he called the Ice Factory, a machine that automatically made and packaged ice at grocery stores and other retailers that had previously bought their ice from local businesses. Stuart began acquiring these flailing producers. His Houston-based company, Packaged Ice, quickly achieved ice supremacy, and in 1998, Stuart bought Reddy. (It still makes the Ice Factory.) A 2001 New Yorker profile christened Stuart the Emperor of Ice…
[Larson reviews the uses to which we put ice– the social (American’s prefer their beverages chilled), but also the more industral: ice is critical to everything from construction (e.g., in high temps it’s used to keep concrete from setting too quickly and becoming brittle) to medical treatment and research…]
… Not far from Reddy’s headquarters is a storage facility with twelve thousand pounds of ice that’s kept on reserve—kept on ice!—for emergencies. When natural disasters level our critical systems, as ritually occurs in Texas, ice is suddenly even more crucial. “When a hurricane hits and power goes out, we’re a lifeline,” Warner says. “It’s not for drinks at that point. It’s ‘how do I keep my food cold?’ ” In the event of a crisis, Reddy works with H-E-B, Walmart, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to distribute ice, often thousands of pounds of it. He vividly remembers when Hurricane Beryl tore through Houston soon after the Fourth of July in 2024. Celebrations had cleared out Reddy and its distributors’ reserves, leading them to scramble to get ice from across the country to Houston. “We had H-E-B calling us for ice, and we were just trying to get it anywhere we could,” Horton, of Polar Ice, recalls.
The moments when ice is needed but unavailable are as irritating and unsettling to us as the breakdown of any utility, even in much lower-stakes contexts than a hurricane’s aftermath. “Ice is actually a very high-passion business,” says Juan Estrada, who directs Reddy plants in the Metroplex and across the state. Customers might stop at a convenience store on the way to a party, gather some snacks, and then ask for a bag of ice at the checkout. If there is no ice available, Estrada says, they’ll likely abandon all their other purchases and walk out. For most of us, these small but searing disappointments are the only times we think about the role of ice in our lives.
But for many Texans, ice can be the only thing keeping us from succumbing to our surroundings. In 2024, Harris County Public Health reported that heat-related illnesses had increased by 329 percent between 2019 and 2023. Texans who are exposed to heat as part of their work in industries including agriculture, construction, and delivery—as is the case for more than 35 percent of Americans—are disproportionately vulnerable, as are older adults and children.
Those of us outside those groups are not immune. As early as March of this year, a ranger at Big Bend National Park tells me, she and her colleagues were responding to between four and six heat-related incidents each week. Rangers bring ice on almost every medical response; it’s crucial for stabilizing patients during what can be an hours-long journey from the park to a hospital. In the summer, says San Antonio Fire Department medic Ashley Long, everyone is vulnerable to the heat, even those who have been hydrating all day. Much like the ice distributors, Long responds to ten times as many emergencies when it’s hot. “The hospitals are just slammed. Every single bed is taken,” she says. “Every disease and debilitation that people have is magnified by the heat.”
Perhaps we don’t think much about ice because doing so requires us to consider how implausible it is that we’re able to live comfortably in such heat. How lucky we are to enjoy a snow cone on a one-hundred-degree day.
An invisible essential: “Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry That’s Keeping Your Beer Cold—and Saving Lives,” from @lonlozzin.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
For a look at the even larger, even more infrastructurally-central, but equally opaque– ‘cold chain’: “Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.”
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
###
As we stay cool, we might note that there’s still time to check in on World Water Week; today is its final day. While its in-person events are happening in Stockholm, much of the program is available online.
Why we should care (UK-centered, but all-too-relevant across the globe).
“Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it”*…
Before he became the renowned author we know, Samuel Clemens– Mark Twain– worked (among other things) as a printer. He knew both the painstaking (and sometimes painful) labor of hand-setting type and the extraordinary cultural power of the mass-printed (by Twain’s time, on steam-powered presses) products that it enabled.
As Jeff Jarvis explains in an excerpt from Hot Type- The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, Twain lived through the transition from hand setting to the Linotype, and through the intertwined transition of the society of which the transition was a part…
In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling author and cultural celebrity; and as a publisher trying to invent a business model for books as an industry.
Now that their machinery could produce volume, publishers needed ways to sell at scale, to build the modern phenomenon of the best-seller. The problem: In 1859, only 1,090 bookstores dotted America. By 1914, there were still only 3,501. So if readers couldn’t find books, books had to find their readers. For certain authors and publishers, including Twain, that was accomplished through subscription publishing, with door-to-door canvassers taking orders for books before they were printed. Until the end of the nineteenth century, three quarters of books in the U.S. were sold this way.
In 1874, the New York Tribune estimated that 50,000 agents were employed by subscription publishers. What a wonderful fictional character it would be to imagine the itinerant peddler pitching not pots or patent medicines but literature and literacy, foot in door after door, blurbing Twain with a few dozen sample pages and illustrations to whet curiosity and demand.
Subscription publishing brought advantages. By collecting orders for books before printing, publishers knew how many copies to produce. Publishers could use customers’ capital to finance production—not unlike a content producer today raising money via Kickstarter or Patreon. Subscription publishing’s cross to bear was snobbery. William Dean Howells dismissed subscription books, carving out a caveat only for his friend Twain: “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”
The regular trade carped that subscription publishers “flood the country with worthless books, poorly written, poorly printed and bound, containing a small amount of matter in large type and with wide margins to the page, for a large price.” Elisha Bliss, Twain’s publisher, defended the trade to the Tribune: “Instead of injuring the regular book business I think we create a thirst for knowledge and thus increase the sale of all kinds of books. In the little town where there are no bookstores the book agent induces people to buy.”
Twain valued these readers as they valued him. They freed him from the expectations of high culture and its critics. And he was certain they’d make him rich. “Harper publishes very high-class books,” he wrote to a friend, “and they go to people who are accustomed to read. That class are surfeited. But there is a vast class that isn’t—the factory hands and the farmers. They never go to a bookstore; they have to be hunted down by the canvasser.”
Twain knew that a new, mass audience had to be corralled, one door knocked after another. As he wrote to London critic Andrew Lang: “The thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated—are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to cater to that little faction is of no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that.” He sought instead to entertain “the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath….I have never tried in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for that, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.”
In 1866, Twain nabbed the assignment of a dream: sailing to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to send back reports to the Sacramento Union. Upon his return to San Francisco, he launched a side gig as a lecturer, amusing ever-larger audiences with his travel tales and humor. “He wouldn’t be a cloistered writer so much as a showman, a public personality, a professional crowd-pleaser. In short, a celebrity,” wrote Ron Chernow. Next, Twain reported for the Alta California about a journey Back East. Then he issued his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which debuted to good reviews and established Twain’s reputation as a wry humorist. The book was published by Twain’s friend Charles Henry Webb, whom he soon dumped, complaining—as would become his habit—about sales.
Next came another enviable gig and a reputation-setting assignment from Alta California, to report from a five-month cruise to the Holy Land on the Quaker City. His letters ran in the paper and were picked up in others across the country. He returned home to a letter from Elisha Bliss of Hartford’s American Publishing Company, soliciting a book on the adventure, which became The Innocents Abroad.
Twain received negotiating advice from famed minister Henry Ward Beecher, who had inspired the Holy Land trip but didn’t go along. In Twain’s telling, Beecher offered a prophetic warning: “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.” Twain reported to his family, “I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations….But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it.” He soon complained this was a bad deal.
Subscription books were fancy and rich in illustration, not so much elegant as tarted up. Buyers had the choice of various bindings as upgrades. The average price of Innocents was $4 (almost $100 today). Readers bought them to display their erudition to visitors: every book a coffee-table book. The Innocents Abroad was received well, favorably reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly by Howells, who noted its length—“in compliance with one of the main conditions of a subscription book’s success, bigness namely”; praised its drollery five times, its irony three times, and its impudence twice; applauded the “amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature”; and counted Twain among America’s humorists, “quite worthy of the company of the best.” Twain’s head swelled sufficiently to accept the praise: “It was quite generally conceded that I was a valuable asset to the American nation and to the great ranks of literature.”
In a year and a half, Innocents sold 82,524 copies, nowhere near Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s 300,000 in its first year, but a success nonetheless. Twain had negotiated well, for he rejected a $10,000 flat payment from Bliss in favor of the 5-percent royalty, which added up to $16,504—about $400,000 today. During his lifetime, no book of Twain’s sold as well as quickly, fueling his chronic grievances with publishers.
Twain wrote a next book for Bliss, about his life Out West, this time demanding half of the profits after manufacturing costs, equaling a royalty of 7.5 percent. Twain told Bliss, “We shall sell 90,000 copies in the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of doubt of that.” Published in 1872, it sold 65,000 in the first year—again, respectable.
Twain and Warren joined to write The Gilded Age, published by Bliss for a 10-percent royalty. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first year. Twain thought he would be a better publisher. He would soon try.
He released The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, selling only 23,600 copies in its first year. He blamed Bliss for mistiming its release. He next published A Tramp Abroad in 1880. Walter A. Friedman provided an accounting: American Publishing sold 62,000 copies in the first year at $3.50 each for a total of $218,000. Just over half of that went to sales agents, who paid their canvassers. The company kept $106,000, out of which it spent $41,540 on printing, leaving a profit of $64,460, of which Twain received $32,000—nearly $1 million today.
As Twain was writing The Prince and the Pauper, Bliss died. He shifted publication of The Prince to his friend James Osgood. This time, Twain funded the book’s publication—complaining that he was out $65,000 before the first copy was printed. Instead of receiving a royalty, he paid Osgood 7.5 percent of sales. Neither was experienced in subscription sales, and of a first printing of 25,000, 5,000 remained in their warehouses after two years. He repeated the mistake with the publication of Life on the Mississippi, which lured only 30,000 orders, far from the 100,000 Twain hoped for. Osgood’s company ended in bankruptcy in 1885. This might have discouraged a sensible man from deciding to become a publisher. Not Twain.
Twain established his own publishing house, giving it the name of his general manager and dogsbody, Charles L. Webster & Co. The aim was to publish only Twain’s books. The first was his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in 1885. Infamously, an engraver subverted the publication by endowing Uncle Silas Phelps with an erect penis, necessitating the scissoring of the offending image from thousands of copies and delaying publication past prime Christmas season. Nonetheless, the Webster Company’s agents sold 60,000 copies, rewarding the author with a check for $54,000. “Once more I experienced a new birth,” Twain wrote. “I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.”
Huck’s success emboldened Twain and Webster to expand as a full-fledged publishing house. Twain worked diligently to solicit the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Twain offered Grant an astounding 70 percent of profits. He told Webster to hire veterans as canvassers, have them wear their Grand Army regalia, and deliver his script: “I presume it is simply a question with you of your choice of bindings, as no American will want to have it said that he has not read General Grant’s book, a work that will descend to your children and will increase in value with every generation.” The memoirs were a stupendous best-seller, 10,000 door-to-door canvassers selling 325,000 two-volume sets in 1886, earning the general’s widow and children as much as $15 million in today’s dollars.
It was downhill from there for Twain and Webster, their record studded with poor choices of books by a half-dozen Civil War generals or their widows, the king of Hawaii, and Pope Leo XIII (“’Twas kind of a fizzle,” recalled Twain’s maid Katy Leary). Twain signed Henry Ward Beecher to write his memoirs, but the minister died before setting pen to paper. Twain was inspired to publish the ambitious Library of American Literature with 1,700 selections by 500 authors in eleven volumes, but failed to grasp the perilous economics of selling such a gargantuan series by subscription. Readers paid a three-dollar down-payment, but Webster & Co. would not collect the rest of its thirty-three-dollar price until after paying the printers thirteen dollars, on top of twelve dollars to sales agents, with Twain carrying that debt in the meantime. The company needed capital to tide itself over, but where was Twain’s—and his wife’s—money? Sunk into the Paige Compositor. [see here] The business analysis was not complicated. His maid understood it: “Mr. Clemens was all deep in the typesetting machine, and he was putting all his money in that so he didn’t have much left to help out the publishing company. That was the beginning of the end of that venture.”
Even without their bad business decisions, Twain’s venture was likely doomed, along with the subscription publishing industry, for books were getting radically cheaper, with ever-more competition. The number of titles published in the U.S. more than doubled, from 4,559 in 1890 to 12,010 in 1914. In 1895, The Bookman began publishing the first lists of most-popular books according to store sales. The term “best-seller” came into general use around 1910, according to historian of publishing Frank Luther Mott, who set the bar for “best-seller” at “one percent of the total population of continental United States for the decade in which the book was published.” To meet Mott’s benchmark, books today would need to sell 3.4 million copies. For comparison, Kristen McLean, a lead industry analyst at NPD BookScan, reported that in 2022, of 45,571 titles released by just the top ten publishers, only 163 books or 0.36 percent sold more than 100,000 copies in a year.
In our age of mass media, we have developed a skewed definition of big—a presumption that many means most. To sell 100,000 books—and congratulations if you do!—is to speak to 0.03 percent of the nation, hardly a resounding expression of the cultural zeitgeist. The blockbuster economics of media—in film, television, music, and books—depends on a few best-sellers to make up for the vast number of lesser bets. But that eternal quest for blockbusters gives the impression that anything called a best-seller is widely influential, while all else is dismissed. Whether selling entertainment to an audience or an audience to advertisers, the mechanization and industrialization of media—begun with the steam-powered press and culminating with the Linotype—spawned a business and cultural obsession with scale…
The rise and fall of subscription book publishing and the birth of mass media: “Mark Twain, America’s First Celebrity Author and Publisher” from @jeffjarvis.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
* Mark Twain, in an April, 1900 letter contributed to the celebration of the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz
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As we roll the presses, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Lee de Forrest; he was born on this date in 1873. An electrical engineer and inventor, he ultimately held 300 patents on a variety of inventions crucial to electronic communications, and co-founded the forerunner organization to the IEEE, De Forest is probably best remembered as the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting (which he also pioneered) and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947.
Unwittingly then had I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite, whose structure shall persist while man inhabits the planet.
– Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (1950), p. 4
Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the award in 1930 of Philo Farnsworth‘s first patent: a television system (U.S. 1,773,980), with a description of his image dissector tube, which was his most important contribution to the development of television.
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