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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | Two months before David Silverman’s 32nd birthday, he visited the Charles Schwab branch in the basement of the World Trade Center to wire his father’s life savings towards the purchase of the Clarinda Typesetting company in Clarinda, Iowa. Typo tells the true story of the Clarinda company’s last rise and fall and with it one entrepreneur’s story of what it means to take on, run, and ultimately lose an entire life’s work. This book is an American dream run aground, told with humor despite moments of tragedy. The story reveals the impact of losing part of an entire industry and answers questions about how that impacts American business. The reader sees in Clarinda’s fate the potential peril faced by every company, and the lessons learned are applicable to anyone who wants to run his or her own business, succeed in a large corporation, and not be stranded by the reality of shifting markets, outsourcing, and, ultimately, capitalism itself. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | David Silverman | | Paperback: | 352 pages | | Publisher: | Soft Skull Press | | Publication Date: | June 21, 2007 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1933368659 | | Product Length: | 8.86 inches | | Product Width: | 6.11 inches | | Product Height: | 1.01 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.93 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.7 inches | | Package Width: | 6.0 inches | | Package Height: | 1.0 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 25 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 25 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 A good read, but the author takes it too easy on himself Aug 31, 2008
By autumn-ajax
"autumn-ajax"
The book certainly held my interest, and I enjoyed reading it. The blow-by-blow story of how an American company is crushed by industry forces (in this case, failing to adapt to low wage off-shoring competition) is compelling.
And yet, after finishing the book, the more I reflected on it, the less I liked it, and the less comfortable I felt with the author. One the plus side, he comes across as being forthright, and I give him props for baring his soul about how his company failed under his watch. Not many people would do that.
At the same time, Silverman did not seem to have much respect or empathy for his employees. He goes out of his way to make derogatory comments about their appearance or habits. The whole state of Iowa is portrayed as a grotesque backwater ... there are gratuitous digs taken against other locations ... indeed, if I recall correctly, no place away from the East Coast gets his respect. And that actually doesn't bother me much, except, that (i) I'm not sure that Silverman ever reconciles his utter failure to reach his employees with his lack of appreciation for them, and (ii) who in their right mind would buy a company in small-town Iowa and expect it to be driven by hard-charging cutting-edge types? That's not a knock on Iowa; the hard truth is that in small towns, opportunities are limited, so many ambitious, intelligent people leave, setting up a negative cycle where it's hard to start a new business because the labor pool isn't right.
Beyond that, there's a little too much of a victim mentality in the book, as if the company would have been fine if Fortuna hadn't thrown all these cataclysms into its way. And yet, the challenges the company faced were fairly prosaic: competition, unscrupulous salesmen, customers who backed out of contracts, employees who were incompetent, obstructionist, and/or resistant to change. Significant challenges to be sure, but ones that should have been expected all along.
There appears to be an element of axe-grinding in this book, which makes me treat it cautiously. That's understandable; as Silverman says, he lost his life savings, his father's life savings, and his father and friend passed away during that time.
Finally, I agree with a previous reviewer: the subtitle is misleading, as Clarinda was not the last American typesetting company, and the obfuscation of the name of Silverman's previous company is curious; it at least should have been explained.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 It looks at business as it is, not how we learned it in school. Jul 10, 2007
By Craig McLeod
For a book that gives you the overall plot in the title, I found this book fascinating. I was riveted to the story, the people and to the journey itself. I have read few fictional books that I cared this much about. Could this really be a business memoir?
It is indeed. It is a business memoir like no other. It's funny, even when the chips are down it still manages to be funny. The only thing I find more impressive than the humor and style with which the book was written is the unforgiving honesty about what is occurring. It is a roller coaster of emotion as you hope (like the author did) for success.
After reading Typo, I now feel like have experienced running my own company. Even ending in failure, this book inspires me even more to try my own hand at it.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
It Is What It Is Jun 21, 2007
By Donald Zirilli
This book is not about how to succeed or how to fail. It's about the nature of humanity and the nature of the Universe. Things change while they stay the same. A man stays the same as the world around him changes, and he is lost. A business stays the same as the industry changes, and it is lost. This book will make you question your assumptions and even your principles, not because they are inherently wrong but because they are not always right... they can be left behind in the wake of global trends. In this book you will see foolish heros and heroic fools, and nobody is ever perfect.
And then when you get to the end, and you think you've got this hard, miserable world figured out, you will hear a story of redemption, a whispered hint of what it could mean to believe in something that never changes.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Funny, Sad, & Enlightening Jun 11, 2007
By John Seiffer
"Business Advisor"
It's rare to find a true business tale that reads like a novel AND is insightful without being preachy. The story is riveting and gives insight to the nuts and bolts of taking over a company that most investors and even many managers are oblivious to. I don't see how a happy ending could have ever been possible for this story but David Silverman bares his soul with wit and grace.
If you're thinking of starting or buying a company or partnering with or lending money to someone who is, you should read this book.
7 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 Title begins correctly, but book goes down from there Jun 10, 2008
By William F. Adams
Only the first word of the title is accurate --- much of this book is a mistake, but Clarinda was not ``the last American typesetter'' (there are a number still in business), and a lot of the ``facts'' in the book are mistaken (or made up). Quark XPress cannot automatically hang punctuation (there was one plug-in which enabled this, by a German company, but the plug-in went away before being released because the API it needed, while present in v3, went away in v4), it is possible to directly compose pages from XML (or SGML), LaTeX is a TeX macro package, not a descendent or derivative of TeX, &c.
The author exhibits a reprehensible lack of respect for others, violating a number of personal confidences, the exposures of which do nothing for the book or the reader (most egregiously, I don't see how a detailed recounting of his business partner's sex life is germane). This lack of respect even extends to the reader --- while a number of company and product names are changed in the book, no note of that is made in the frontmatter as is customary, nor does the author make any mention of this in his list of errata. (For the curious, DataData was really InnoData, SuperLeaf was really InterLeaf and I believe FUN coding is XML, but there's not enough context for me to tell.) There's also no index.
The typesetting of the book is quite pedestrian, rife with errors such as bad breaks, orphans, widows and stacks (as well as the numerous grammatical errors and misspellings noted on the author's errata page).
Most painful of all is the knowledge that many others in the industry overcame the same difficulties which bankrupted the author's company --- succeeding by working harder and smarter and finding new business instead of hiding in their private office playing computer games --- but their story won't be told because they're all too busy working and meeting their commitments, too honest and decent to run away and make up stories as the author of this book did.
See all 25 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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