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Back a new edition of Six Centuries of Type & Printing, now available on Kickstarter

Hi. I’m Glenn Fleishman, a Seattle-based technology journalist and two-time winner on Jeopardy! ✴ My latest book How Comics Are Made, a history of the production and reproduction of newspaper comics, can be pre-ordered now! (It appeared first as How Comics Were Made). ✴ I’m available as a book editor and crowdfunding consultant. ✴ At Macworld, I answer readers’ questions for Mac 911. ✴ Over my career, I have appeared as a freelance writer in the Atlantic, Smithsonian magazine, the Economist, Fast Company, the New York Times, TidBITS, and Wired, among many others. ✴ In 2019 and 2020, I created over 100 Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsules and wrote and published the book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. ✴ I’ve written a number of books across many technical and design topics. ✴ You can hear me podcast at The Incomparable network. ✴ Editor and production manager of Shift Happens. ✴ I have funded seven Kickstarter campaigns successfully, raising nearly $400,000. ✴ isbn.nu is a book price shopping service I‘ve operated for 25 years. ✴ I may answer email at glenn@glennf.com. ✴ Thanks for visiting.

Vocations in which I have engaged: Sound-board operator, typesetter, graphic designer, curriculum developer, imaging-center manager, professional granola maker, box-office manager, course manager, catalog manager, programmer, data-entry clerk, editor, conference planner, speaker, book-information expert, columnist, actor in anti-smoking videos, reporter, radio guest. I was once paid to write high-quality gibberish—literally.

I was trained as a typesetter, one of the last such apprenticed in that profession, and have a degree in graphic design. I learned how to typeset and print on a letterpress in college, and in 2011 took a class to refresh and extend my knowledge. In 2017, the School of Visual Concepts hosted me as their first designer in residence, where I honed my letterpress skills and printed a book of my reporting.

In 2024, I crowdfunded and produced the book How Comics Were Made, designed by Mark Kaufman. The book rights were acquired by Andrews McMeel Publishing in late 2024 for future printings. From 2018 to 2023, I worked as the editor and production manager on Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, a three-volume, 1,376-page history of keyboards produced in an edition of several thousand. I helped him with developmental editing through final production, oversaw printing bids and production, and handled logistics, like warehousing and delivery.

In 2019 and 2020, I created the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, an edition of around 100 sets of printing and type artifacts, with the accompanying book, Six Centuries of Type & Printing. I worked on my elementary school, junior high, high school, and college newspapers, both as an editor and typesetter/graphic designer.

Things I did: In high school, I acted and made callbacks for the movie Stand By Me, and appeared in local anti-smoking education videos. ✴ I helped broadcast a feature film for the first time over the Internet in 1995, Party Girl. ✴ Between 2010 and 2015, I wrote about 400 blog posts for The Economist; I've written about 100 other articles for them since 2005, including a U.S. edition cover story and many print features. ✴ I was the editor of the The Magazine from 2012 to 2014, a digital magazine for curious people with a technology bent and eclectic tastes, and owned it from mid-2013 until it was shuttered after subscriptions fell. ✴ During the same period, I produced and hosted The New Disruptors, a podcast about creators finding their audiences directly. ✴ From 2000 to 2013, I wrote a column every two or four weeks for The Seattle Times about Apple stuff. ✴ For a decade, I wrote nearly daily at my own wireless data site, Wi-Fi Networking News. ✴ Between 1998 and the late 20-oughties, I wrote at various points extensively for The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, and Business 2.0. I have written dozens of books, many of them in the Take Control ebook series. ✴ You may hear me at times on the radio as a guest on national programs like All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5, Science Friday, and To the Point. ✴ I was a weekly tech pundit on KUOW for three years. ✴ I worked for Amazon for six months in 1996–1997 and never regret having left when I did. I know more than most human beings on the planet about the vagaries of book data, such as page count and authoritative titles. ✴ My first computer was a 1979 OSI C1P. ✴ I love the smell of letterpress ink, taking close-up macro photos of bees and ladybird beetles, and eating goat-cheese fritters. ✴ There are many other things I could tell you that would bore the pants off you. ✴ My old site is still reachable with outdated content at links like this and this, but I’m only maintaining it to avoid breaking a few useful static pages.