Introduction

Fittingly for a book published on New Year's Eve, 1931, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine (RFBBM) is a modernist text caught in a transitional period. As the Great Depression deepened, the winter of 1931–2 proved to be a pivotal moment for transatlantic modernism. Expatriate communities in Europe began to disband, their participants returning (or emigrating) to America, and American writers who remained at home found previous allegiances and aesthetic commitments splintering. Projects and publications were re-imagined, set aside or abandoned altogether, and in the winter of 1932 Bob Brown's reading machine looked set to join the modernist casualties of the Great Depression. Indeed, that is the view most critics hold, and to a certain extent they are correct: the reading machine was never manufactured commercially, and the delicate prototype constructed by Ross Saunders in Cagnes-sur-Mer during the summer of 1931 did not make the transatlantic journey to join the cultural vanguards back in America. However, evidence strongly suggests that Rose Brown led the development of a new working prototype after the Browns returned to New York. Although definitive prima facie evidence for Rose Brown's Reading Machine is predictably unavailable, the Browns’ archive and the public record provide strong documentary evidence for its existence. Multiple references to (and recollections of) a second prototype appear at regular intervals in the Browns’ archives in Special Collections at UCLA and SIU Carbondale, and in a host of mass-market, middlebrow and specialist publications spanning the 1930s–1950s. For the first time, this chapter tracks the evolution of the readies project on the other side of the Atlantic, and its journey from an avant-garde and commercial proposition to an instrument for social change. In doing so, it recovers the lost history of one of avant-garde modernism's most extraordinary long-term projects, which cuts across multiple literary and non-literary formations.

However, even the literary emphasis of RFBBM was cross-formational. The Browns had crafted a strategic coalition of individuals, most of whom were involved in publishing as well as creative writing and political activism.