Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised

Bob Brown’s reading machine was a mechanised speed-reading system that scrolled micrographically-printed, highly visual texts called ‘readies’ under a magnifying screen. Although Brown’s work is now celebrated by critics, the current scholarly consensus is that the invention itself never worked. Drawing on previously-unknown archival evidence, this chapter presents a major revision of the reading machine’s foundation narrative, from its origins in WWI-era Greenwich Village, to its first working prototype built by the American artist-engineer Ross Saunders in France in 1931. The chapter focuses on three key cultural nodes that contributed to the evolution of Bob and Rose Brown’s reading machines: avant-garde writers of ‘The Revolution of the Word’, who fostered Brown’s project in transatlantic journals including transition, The Morada and The New Review; expatriate publishers such as the Black Sun and Hours Press (and trade journals including The Publishers’ Weekly); and American expatriate newspapers such as The Paris Tribune. In his cross-formational strategy he identified technology and technicity as points of convergence between these diverse groups. This chapter recontextualises Brown’s project by analysing the readies through these channels using a techno-bathetic framework. In doing so, it reveals both the complexities of that project, and its vast cultural reach and significance.