I’m Glenn Fleishman, a Seattle-based comics and printing historian, technology writer, entrepreneur, and two-time winner on Jeopardy!
Over the last three decades, I've contributed to the Economist, Smithsonian, the Atlantic, Fast Company, Wired, Macworld, Increment, Fortune, American History, Boing Boing, and many others—including many long gone, such as Aldus Magazine and Business 2.0.
I’ve written about space probes, computational photography, online security, the history of punctuation marks and printing technology, and cryptography — among many other topics. My current professional focus is on 19th and 20th century printing processes, particularly related to newspaper cartoon reproduction.
Since the early 2000s, I’ve written regular columns, reviews, and other coverage for Macworld. I’ve contributed for nearly 35 years to TidBITS. I currently have eight actively updated titles in the Take Control Books series across topics mostly related to networking, privacy, security, and communication.
I have raised over $400,000 through crowdfunding for nine projects, the three biggest being the books Six Centuries of Type & Printing (2nd Edition) and How Comics Were Made and the historical project The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. I’ve advised and consulted for other crowdfunding efforts that have cumulatively raised several million dollars. That includes the 2023 book Shift Happens, a 1,386-page, 3-volume history of keyboards, which I edited and for which I acted as crowdfunding, printing, and fulfillment manager. It raised $750,000 at Kickstarter and sold several thousand copies. (I’m available for hire as an editor and as a crowdfunding consultant and project manager.)
In 2019, I created the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project to produce 108 small museums full of genuine artifacts, past and present, from across the history of type and printing; the edition sold out in February 2022. I wrote book that was letterpress-printed to go along with the museum, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, which tracks the development of U.S. and European printing from the 1400s to the present. (A 2nd edition was funded in 2025 using offset printing.) I gave a talk about the museum in June 2019 you can watch on YouTube.
I am a regular panelist and guest on The Incomparable, a network of geek-adjacent programs. I run isbn.nu, a book price shopping service. My small-edition publishing firm is Aperiodical LLC. Currently, I am one of the world’s leading experts on flong.
Past work
In 2017, I was the Designer in Residence at the School of Visual Concepts working in its letterpress program. As part of my residency, I designed and printed a book of some of my reporting on type, printing, and history reporting.
From late 2012 to late 2014, I was the editor and, starting in May 2013, the publisher of The Magazine, a digital magazine for curious people with a technical bent. I wrote a column every two or four weeks for The Seattle Times about Apple stuff from 2000 to 2013.I wrote nearly daily at my own wireless data site, Wi-Fi Networking News on that popular topic from 2001 to 2011. I hosted The New Disruptors (2012–2014, 2018–2019), a podcast about creators finding direct relationships with audiences and unique funding models to pursue their work.
Between 1998 and the late 20-oughties, I wrote at various times extensively for the New York Times, Wired, Ars Technica, Popular Science, and Business 2.0. At one point in the late 2010s, I did a several-month-long reporting stint for Fortune as part of a 24-hour newsroom, filing hundreds of stories. I have written on the order of 30 books, including self-published works like Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It (2017) and London Kerning (2018), as well as many titles in the Take Control ebook series. I was one of the authors of Real World Scanning and Halftones across three editions (1993, 1998, and 2004), a book that helped transition many designers and production from analog to digital print production.
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, editor, conference planner, speaker, book-information expert, columnist, reporter, radio guest. I was once quite literally paid to write some high-quality gibberish.
I was trained as a typesetter, one of the last such apprenticed in that profession when it was still a viable career, 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 and then spent 2017 printing a book on a letterpress. I worked on newspapers in school from 3rd grade through my senior year in college, both as an editor and typesetter/graphic designer.