Introduction

Bob Brown's Reading Machine promised to transliterate the visual and temporal energies of the Machine Age in a new reader-focused textual space, within the modernist avant-gardes, but also far beyond them. Although Brown's idea reached across multiple fields of cultural production in complex ways, the central concept for his reading machine and corresponding textual medium ‘the readies’ was quite straightforward. His first surviving sketch for the project is a 1923 holograph manuscript he wrote in Brazil, which describes ‘a simple machine run by a motor to carry a tape under a reading glass’. Following a period of development in 1929, Brown expanded the idea in 1930, explaining that the reading machine itself would be ‘as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio; compact, minute, operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll which carries the contents of a book and is no bigger than a typewriter ribbon’. The micrographic ‘contents’ printed on that ‘tough tissue roll’ were known as ‘the readies’. Brown described the readies as ‘a moving type spectacle’ that involved ‘reading at the speed rate of the day with the aid of a machine, a method of enjoying literature in a manner as up-to-date as the lively talkies’ in cinema. This simple idea rapidly evolved into a co-created vision for an entirely new media ecology, which became the focal point for multiple avant-gardes and other specialist professions in a global cottage industry spanning decades and continents. Experimentalists from a variety of fields produced ‘sample’ texts in full-sized print that Brown collected in his 1931 anthology Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The contributors included F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, but also influential figures such as Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Hilaire Hiler, Eugene and Maria Jolas, Norman Macleod, Samuel Putnam, Rose Brown (née Watson, Bob's wife), and many other writers associated with transition's ‘Revolution of the Word’. Despite their utopian ambitions to transcend space and cultural barriers (which frequently cropped up in transition, particularly among the Jolas’ coterie), the technicity of reading Readies, and the palpability of the prototype reading machine, pulls us relentlessly back to earth.