Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper

by Alex Wright

A sweeping history of America’s first media revolution: the rise of the newspaper, and the transformation of a fledgling republic into the world’s first information superpower

“Captivating … a rip-roaring, richly entertaining feast.” ―Wall Street Journal

No society had ever generated so much ink and paper in so little time. Between the Revolutionary War and the dawn of the twentieth century, the number of American newspapers increased five hundredfold, producing the greatest outpouring of printed matter the world had ever seen. In Empire of Ink, Alex Wright tells the story of how an unruly young democracy found its voice—fueled by a mix of new technologies, bold public policies, and a distinctly American zeal for free expression that unleashed a torrent of newsprint, knitting together a fractious republic.

It was a wild, boisterous era—populated by gunslinging editors, tramp printers, zealous reformers, brilliant inventors, and literal snake-oil salesmen. Together, they transformed journalism, built a new industry, and helped forge the nation’s character. By century’s end, this freewheeling press had yielded to corporate interests. Wealthy media barons seized on new technologies and economies of scale to consolidate power—shaping the mass media that would define the twentieth century.

Vividly bringing to life a pivotal chapter in American history, Empire of Ink reveals how the same struggles over truth, technology, and power continue to echo into today’s digital age.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Journalism, American History, American, Business, Technology

384 pages, Hardcover

First published June 16, 2026

About the author

Alex Wright is a Brooklyn-based writer, researcher, and designer whose most recent book is Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rouges, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper. His previous books include Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age and Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, which was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots."

Alex's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Believer, Columbia Journalism Review, Public Domain Review, Big Think, Salon.com, The Wilson Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, and Harvard Magazine, among others.

Alex has led digital design projects for The New York Times, Google, Etsy, Instagram, and Hearst Newspapers, among others. He holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Reviews

[Blaine DeSantis]

Spectacular!! Alex Wright has written an amazing book on the history of newspapers and printing here in the US from the Revolutionary War times up through the end of the 19th century. Filled with memorable characters and stories, Wright has done an outstanding job of researching people, places and technology and then wraps it up with an Epilogue that shows the similarities with the internet and Social Media to similar developments with printing and newspapers. Todays flame wars do not hold a candle to the duels, fisticuffs and outright mean spiritedness of the 18o0s?
Easy to read, this is a fine book for anyone who wonders how we got to where we are today!!

[Gary Sosniecki]

Even though I took a required History and Principles of Journalism class in 1972, then a year later embarked on a 43-year newspaper career, I was surprised how much I didn’t know about newspaper history until reading this book. Many chapters were a complete surprise to me. I read excerpts aloud to my wife, also a career journalist, also now retired. The last chapter, about the future of our industry, will keep me awake at night.

[Book Club of One]

The history of the media in the United States has long been one of technology change, adaption and adjustment. Alex Wright's Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper looks at the long scale of the newspaper in America from the early days of the nation through to the establishment of mass media in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The narrative is arranged by parts, with supporting chapters. Each part looks at a specific time period and describes the technological, social and financial ways newspapers operated. As in other industries, it began small scale with hobbyists or official agents of governments and booksellers. The rapid growth and ease of the spread of information was thanks to two things. First the exclusion of newspapers as copyrighted material, meaning it was very easy to duplicate their content without the need for attribution. Second was the establishment of the United States postal service and its standard low cost to send a newspaper. With these two factors in their favor, newspapers proliferated with each town having at least one, or skilled printers living an itinerant life, floating from press to press as the mood or local temper suited them.

Wright details the way the technologies shifted enabling the small scale printers to work and how the industrialization of newspaper production slowly, or sometimes suddenly squeezed out smaller presses. A crisis that has been repeated with the societal embrace of the internet leading to a decline in journalism focused news.

A detailed and fascinating exploration of the daily newspaper and the figures who created them.

For readers or researchers of industry focused histories, cultural distribution of knowledge, the newspaper.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Jonathan]

I received a copy of this book directly from the author in exchange for my honest opinion through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

Having tackled two previous histories of information management, Alex Wright turns his gaze towards the dissemination of information through print. From the weekly local broadsheet printed on rag paper to the corporate behemoths of the late 20th century, newspapers reigned supreme as the primary source of information on current events throughout the quickly expanding nation.

I was primed for this book by having very recently read Jeremy Black's The Power of Knowledge, which helped me interpret the newspaper's story as an intermediary step in the democratization of information and knowledge. Early papers served as a sort of widening of the "Republic of Letters," to include not just the intellectual elite, but the everyday "man or woman on the street" perspective. It was a motley bunch of printers, radicals, and hobbyists who helped to develop the culture of newspapers - as cheap wood-based paper came into use, and small-batch "hobby" printing presses became somewhat affordable (like maybe the equivalent cost of an ATV, if not cheaper), more and more people were able to print off small batches of local or even "hyperlocal" news. Dissemination of information was fast - through free or very inexpensive postal dissemination, newspaper editors would exchange their papers with other editors in other locales, who would then reprint the articles they thought would be important for their readers to know about. This was all part of spreading information throughout the republic, and each knew that these other papers would reprint their stories. Newspapers were openly partisan, and this often led to threats from politicians and others the writers targeted.

Wright does an excellent job of describing this culture and illuminates some wonderful examples - one of my favorites is the eleven-year-old girl in upstate New York, who published a small paper she used much as modern-day tweens or teenagers would a zine or a blog or Substack. This was no silly stuff either; she wrote about the war from the perspective of a young woman whose brother had gone off to fight, and included contributions from relatives and neighbors.

The eventual professionalization and corporatization of the industry, particularly following the development of the linotype machine (Wright does a terrific job with the story of how Mark Twain lost his fortune in investing in a potential competing machine), and the ending of the open sharing of stories between papers, in many ways, closed off this outlet to the everyday person wanting to share their thoughts. We are now in a new era of the Internet, which has again opened up this outlet. It is difficult not to see a similar closing-off occurring, and that should concern us all.

Highly recommended.

[Socraticgadfly]

A 3.25 rounded down. Contra the subtitle, though, of course these people didn't invent it. That would be the likes of Ben Franklin (mentioned) and John Peter Zenger (not mentioned) in this book. Now, the types of people in the subtitle may have invented the MODERN American newspaper, but that's different.

Besides the "printers," we do get a fair amount of "rogues." Tramp printers, code duello antebellum Southern editors and publishers, and a frontier version of the same in the further West. "Radicals"? Not so much. None of the feminists or Black abolitionists mentioned are radicals, and there's nothing at all in here about publishing efforts of the more radical portion of organized labor, anarchists and others near the end of the 19th century. And, a quick teh Google will tell you there were many such papers. Read here for much more, including book and article sources readily available to Wright. But his book doesn't talk about them. Read more here with lists of anarchist newspapers and names. That said, given the author's background, that's not surprising. Some of the non-radicals mentioned were rogues, though — good old capitalist rogues.

A few details about the various incarnations of the rotary press were new to me, including one early inventor refusing to patent it because he thought it would help less well-off people print newspapers more easily. Teenager editors and printers were new to me. Mini-presses were new, and the boomlet in military unit publications in the Civil War. Not a lot else.

Speaking of the Civil War, there was one notable error in the book. No, Abe Lincoln didn't declare an official end to the war in August 1866. That would be Andy Johnson.

Otherwise, and probably reflecting his background again, there's plenty of data. There's a focus on design, primarily fonts and typography, which ties back to setting a stick of type, and also on early illustration efforts. Otherwise?

"Workmanlike" might be a good word for the book. And, I may come back and kick this book down to two stars.

[Claudia Majetich]

This would be a better book if it were 2/3 the size of the current one, which is why I gave it only 3 stars. However, if you are at all interested in the history of printing, papermaking, and typesetting, I recommend it highly...you just have to put up with some annoying repetition.

The author has done a great job of researching information about small, local newspapers from their start in the American colonies through until the end of the 19th century. These were hyperlocal newspapers, and their stock in trade seems to have been political and personal invective, along with general purpose stories that oftentimes were reprinted (without attribution) to other newspapers.

There are lots of colorful characters and stories to enjoy, and Wright does a great job of bringing them to life. He's also very good at explaining how printing technology operated and how it and the day-to-day tasks if printing staff, changed over time, along with

He also explains how new technology changed newspapers including new papermaking processes that were compatible with the new high speed rotary presses, and how the invention of the Linotype finally completed the mechanization of the printing process. Other changes such as wire services, and the switch to ad-driven revenue, are mentioned.

But, the writing needed to be tightened up. His basic thesis--that the distributed ecosystem of individual printers & their papers are similar to the early days of the internet--is an interesting one. He, however, finds ways to remind us of this on a regular basis throughout the book. It would have been better to stick to the story throughout the main body of the book, and put a tightly written analytic chapter at the end of the book.

[Nancy]

The United States, in a very real sense, printed itself into existence. from Empire of Ink by Alex Wright

When I was a girl my best friend and I dreamed about starting a newspaper, planning to use a shed near her house, talking about how we would write it and distribute it.

So it was fascinating to learn that in 1861 a twelve-year-old girl did start her own paper and had three thousand subscribers! Her father had won a printing press in a poker game and her brother printed small jobs. ‘Little Nellie’s Paper’ was filled with “poems, observations on the weather, and the assorted musings of a twelve-year-old girl on small town life.” She “delved into local history,” and gathered a “stable of contributors.”

This history is full of surprises and stories. Mark Twain impoverished himself supporting a failed new printing press invention. He had started as a printer’s devil and later worked for a newspaper in the West when editors wore guns for protection.

From the beginning, American newspapers differed from the presses controlled by royal rulers. They could hold authorities to account and flame political movements. Sensational stories fueled readership while advertising revenue spurred the size and number of newspapers.

Wright offers up a very readable and exciting history and concludes with an analysis of contemporary pressures altering newspapers and how people get information. He predicts that we are at a historical tipping point of change, “an echo, however distorted, of the chaotic and pluralistic press culture of the nineteenth century.”

Thanks to Basic Books for a free book through NetGalley.

[Jeff]

Solid History Rhymes With Present Themes. This is a solid history showing the rise of "organic" newspapers of the 19th century in particular, from their earliest days in the 18th century and earlier to their corporatization as the 20th century began.

You're going to learn a lot here, from the pre-teen girl going "viral" *well* before that was a thing for creating her own newspaper in an era when few adult men could accomplish the feat to Mark Twain's ultimate downfall, and Wright does it all in a very approachable style.

And yes, there is quite a bit of rhyming history going on here with the "wild and wooly" early newspapers and the similar late 2000s/ early 2010s heyday of the blogosphere, before both ultimately became corporatized and heavily regulated.

Clocking in at 19% bibliography, this is also a pretty solidly documented history, which is always a great thing to see, particularly when so much is covered that so many are likely unfamiliar with.

Overall truly a well written history packed full of knowledge and insights from a period and topic of history that most likely few indeed will have very little knowledge of before coming into this book, and thus one that will prove quite illuminating indeed as the parallels of this period and our own are quite obvious.

Very much recommended.

[John]

A well-written history of newspapers in the US through the close of the 19th Century. Interesting anecdotes about interesting characters, along with an effort to analogize the wild and wooly early days newspapers to our present media scene. I wasn't fascinated by every chapter, but there was more than enough to keep my interest through the end, including the sermonizing about the morass we currently find ourselves in.

[Daniel Silliman]

This is the smartest book on media I have read in a long time. Empire of Ink takes key insights and theory explaining digital media and then goes back and applies it to print journalism, tracing and tracking the rise of 20th c., industrial, professional media.

I will recommend this book to anyone working in media and anyone trying to understand our media environment.

[Stuart Miller]

Who knew that newspaper publishers once carried guns for protection against irate readers? This and other little-known facts about the development of newspapers in America makes for a fascinating read.

[Liam Mark]

Good book

[Lyra Stardust]

Very engaging from start to finish.

[Oliver Bennett]

A nice book to read.

[Orlando Torella]

A compelling story that was hard to put down.

[Isabella Martin]

A well-written book that kept me interested from beginning to end.

[William Ellis]

An interesting book with a clear style.

[William Bennett]

I really enjoyed this. As a cultural heritage professional, the history of printed media is perennially of interest, and the intersection of newspaper journalism and the sociopolitical development of the United States was a compelling topic, especially in this time of debated truth and attempted control of mass media by those in power. The narrative is engaging and informative, and I found the first third extremely readable; the middle portion was less so. I felt this to be due to an abundance of detail that I found more of a slog to wade through, but the focus—mainly on western US papers and the Wild West dynamic of that publishing tradition—was clearly of particular interest to Wright. The final chapters picked up again for me, however. Could be a good book club selection as there is a lot of discussion potential.