0.1 Afterword

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The adventures of bob brown and his reading machine: abbreviated writing and browsers fifty years before txt, tweets, and www.

The significance of Bob Brown’s eerily prophetic The Readies now resides as much in media experiments as in literary studies. Taken as a whole, the manifesto speaks not only to students of modernism, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to a wider audience interested in media technologies' impact on a process we take for granted: reading.

This important manifesto, on a par with André Breton's Surrealist manifestos or Tristan Tzara's Dadaist declarations, includes plans for an electric reading machine and strategies for preparing the eye for mechanized reading. There are instructions for preparing texts as “readies” and detailed quantitative explanations about the invention and mechanisms involved in this peculiar machine. Brown considered the prepared texts as a genre of writing and a brand, like Google, and he often capitalizes Readies in his manifesto. This introduction follows that convention by capitalizing Readies when referring to the specific brand in Brown's work, and not capitalizing readies when referring to the type of product or process. Perhaps one day Readies will become readies the way Escalator, a brand of the Otis Company, became escalator, a moving stairs machine; if that acceptance had occurred, one would think of readies as superseding the book.

In the generic spirit of avant-garde manifestos, Brown writes with enthusiastic hyperbole about the machine's breathtaking potential to change how we read and learn. In 1930, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves or in televised images had a science fiction quality—or, for the avant-garde, a fanciful art-stunt feel. Today, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text-messaging (with its abbreviated language), electronic text readers, and even online books like the digital edition of this volume. Brown's practical plans for his reading machine, and his descriptions of its meaning and implications for reading in general, were at least fifty years ahead of their time.

These lines conjure a fantastic, if archaic, alternate world in their exhaustive descriptions of the reading machine’s operations, the details seeming at once quaint, futuristic…and Kindle-esque: "Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 or million words spill out before his eyes . . . in one continuous line of type . . . . My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead . . . magnifying glass . . . moved nearer or farther from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him." (Use of the word “browse,” incidentally, in reference to a graphical interface device rather than perusal in a bookshop or library does not appear again until the late 1980s, with the advent of database browsers.)