The Readies - Softcover

Brown, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692388036 ISBN 13: 9780692388037

Publisher: Roving Eye Press, 2015

Synopsis

In 1930, Bob Brown predicted that the printed book was bound for obsolescence. The time has come, he insisted, to rid the reader of the cumbersome book. He invented a machine that would allow one to read books and any text extremely fast and in a hyper abbreviated form. He called these abbreviated texts, with em dashes replacing words: readies. He envisioned sending the condensed texts through wireless networks. The Readies, describes these eponymously named abbreviated texts and his plans for a reading machine, but since he printed only 150 copies, the volume is practically unknown outside of a small circle of scholars. With this new edition, Craig Saper hopes to introduce Bob Brown's Roving Eye Press books to a new generation of readers.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Carlton Brown (1886-1959) was an American author, journalist, publisher, and collector. Born in Chicago. Brown wrote pulp fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, avant-garde publications, and experimented with a book of visual poetry; he also contributed pieces to various magazines and newspapers in New York City and established journals in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and London. In 1929, he and his wife temporarily settled in France where they became involved in the expatriate literary community in Paris. While there, he established Roving Eye Press to promote a reading machine that he invented. His literary works include What Happened to Mary (1913), The Readies (1930), Globe-Gliding (1930), Words (1931), Gems (1931), and Readies for Bob Brown's Machine (1931). He also wrote or co-wrote a number of best-selling cookbooks, including The European Cookbook (1936), 10,000 Snacks (1937), The Wine Cook Book (1941), and The Complete Book of Cheese (1955).

Craig Saper is Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. Program at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He is the author of Intimate Bureaucracies (2012), Networked Art (2001), Artificial Mythologies (1997) and has edited or co-edited volumes on Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer's Textshop Experiments (2015), Posthumography (2010), Imaging Place (2009), and Drifts (2007). He has published widely on Fluxus and visual poetry and serves as the Reviews Editor and Blog Report columnist for Rhizomes.

Review

Of the many Americans who helped to shape the cultural explosion we call Modernism, few came up to the mark of Bob Brown for sheer esprit and intellectual daring. To read him is to know what intellectual freedom could or should or might truly mean. --Jerome McGann, The John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia

Reading Brown's manifesto, it's hard not to recognize uncanny preludes to today's claims that digitization will establish a new utopia of cheap books, downloadable from even the most obscure library while you re waiting for the bus. --Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Roving Eye Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0692388036
• ISBN 13: 9780692388037
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96