Photography by Whitney Curtis
For weeks, Jeff Marsh sat and stared at pieces of paper as they shot, or fluttered, or curled, out of his printer.
By the 100,000th sheet, he had his answer.
“As single pieces of paper start moving fast, they’re aerodynamic,” he explains. “Pieces of paper are almost living things. No two will come out of a printer the same way.” Once he’d learned how to direct and accumulate them, he patented an integrated high-speed bookbinder and trimmer and a new glue process, and easy as that—if you don’t count hundreds of thousands of dollars and sleepless nights and months just sitting there watching and thinking—he’d invented the Espresso Book Machine.
It could print a single book, library quality, in three minutes.
While Marsh was knocking the final kinks out of his prototype, a friend happened to hear a lecture by the venerable Jason Epstein, father of the trade paperback and editor of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Gore Vidal. Epstein remarked that in the future, if the right machine could be invented, customers might be able to stand in a bookstore and print their own copy of an out-of-stock title. After the lecture, Marsh’s friend told Epstein the machine might already exist, in a home office south of Wentzville, Mo.
Epstein and a partner licensed Marsh’s machine and, in 2003, founded On Demand Books. By then, people were coming from all over the world to see the machine work. “I’d hand them a book and say, ‘Here, hot off the press!’ and they’d say, ‘That did not happen!’” Marsh says, laughing. “When you stand there and get a book in three minutes, it’s an emotional event. You realize what this can do in the world.”
There are now Espresso Book Machines—which cost about $100,000 apiece—at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt; the New York Public Library; the World Bank in D.C.; the Charing Cross Road branch of Blackwell’s London bookstore; Harvard Book Store; and about two dozen similar places. The University of Missouri–Columbia just bought one; Washington University might follow.
But Espresso’s next growth spurt will come, irony of ironies, from Google.
The online-search company has scanned more than 2 million books published before 1923—and therefore in the public domain. Now it’s partnered with On Demand Books so customers can order physical copies. Next, Google wants to make “orphaned” out-of-print books, whose authors can’t be found, available in their entirety. The Department of Justice wagged a cautionary finger before sending the case back to the courts, as Microsoft, Amazon, and The Authors Guild raised charges of unfair monopoly.
Asked his opinion of the book-rights battle, Marsh is deliberately laconic: “Oh, I’d just let it happen and just make sure everybody gets their royalties.” He’s less interested in the civil war than in the revolution. “We could have had a machine in Kabul the minute it fell, producing all those textbooks they needed,” he points out. “If we get into Third World countries and start making books, we are going to empower much more of our world.”
So how did Marsh, 66, come up with such a world-changing invention? “I picked the right grandfather,” he says dryly.
In 1905, Albert Marsh—still in his early twenties—wrote a chemical formula that made a stable electric heating element possible. Proclaimed “father of the electronic heating industry,” he went on to design toasters, electric furnaces, and ovens.
His grandson grew up operating a ham radio and fixing everything he could find. He started playing chess at 5; he studied hypnotism at 11. High school bored him, and the prospect of college appalled him. Finally, at 28, he went back for an electrical-engineering degree. By then, he’d already been president of his own steel-fabrication company. But once he started taking classes, he says, “It was like taking a drug.” He went on for an MBA, and he’s now finishing a Ph.D. in organization and management.
In the corporate world, Marsh says his job title usually boiled down to “It’s all screwed up, give it to Marsh and let him do something with it.” At Kelsey-Hayes, an automotive-parts supplier, he put together the first skid-control prototype. But it took 20 years for what we now call antilock brakes to gain, well, traction. “People weren’t ready to admit that they needed driving help,” he remarks. “Then, in the early ’70s, I got the patent that integrated traction and skid control, and that took 20 years. Some things take off fast; others take off slow.” Espresso? “It has a chance of stepping up pretty fast.”
The project started in the late ’90s, when Marsh met Harvey Ross, a St. Louis engineer he describes as “a very unusual man.” Ross was a systems engineer; he helped install the DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system to detect Soviet bombers in northern Canada. Long before the Kindle, Ross was envisioning a library of digital books—but he’d never figured out how to print them one by one.
Marsh visited publishing houses, talked to curmudgeonly pressmen who still romanticized hot type, and came to understand just enough of the traditional process to cut himself loose from its constraints. Then he built Espresso—and the conservative publishing industry was too terrified to use it. Fixated on existing technology and copyright mechanisms, publishers couldn’t figure out how to protect rights digitally.
Epstein’s enthusiasm was the tipping point, says Marsh. Now, as chief of R&D for On Demand Books, he’s still refining his machine. “Is it the optimum process yet?” he asks. “No. Do I have the solutions patented? Yes. We have six patents and a whole passel pending.”
Marsh is also a software designer, yet he describes himself as “a book person.” And when Espresso took its first electronic, out-of-town order—a mouse click by a guy in Chicago—he was deeply moved to see what book the machine spat out three minutes later: the anticensorship classic Fahrenheit 451.
He was pronounced “the new Gutenberg.” Was it a rush? “For a while. Emotionally, I’m pretty much done with it, though.
“Now I’m working in energy,” he continues eagerly. “I think there are stores of energy we haven’t asked the right questions about.”
His brain feeds on questions, wildly speculative ones. Asked why more people aren’t inventive, he says instantly: “Because we are trained to ask, ‘Why?’ and not, ‘Why not?’ We are trained to think in a serial, linear way. And the trap, of course, is that the world does not operate in serial fashion.”
Marsh thinks in front of 100 inches of monitor, using two keyboards to run three computers and keeping a crazy number of windows open at once. “I do things a different way every day,” he confides. “I brush my teeth differently, I put my clothes on differently. You have to break serial thinking as much as you can.” He keeps his mind open, and with the help of Transcendental Meditation and “30 minutes of white noise called a spa” every morning, he watches his brain work.
What’s it like in there? “All sorts of abstractions running around, little chunks of thought linking together, and you sit and wait until a solution burbles to the surface,” he says. These days, he’s thinking nonstop about untapped energy sources, trying to make his grandfather proud. “Skid control and traction did social good,” he says. “The book machine, I think, will have a significant effect. And if I can pull off the fourth…”
Why not?
