The readies, by bob brown  (Page 16/22)

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The above is neither telegraphese nor a stab in the dark at writing modernly. It is but a crude attempt to convey the optical continuity of reading matter as it appears spinning past the eye out of a word-machine. It is hampered by the connecting hyphens and columns and lacks MOTION, the one essential of the new reading principle.

With written matter moving before the eyes new forms of expression will develop naturally and surely more expressive ones, at least a technical eye-lingo of the Readie will result. The eye refreshed will ask for more, bawl for occasional tickling, eye-bawl, even tinted paper could be used to help along the flow of words and thoughts; and surely colored lighting effects on the reading tape. One colored strand in the up-to-date binder’s stitching relieves the dull look of a book.

Useless words will go out for a long walk and never come back into the reading language again,

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they will just walk out, drop out, dim out, fade out — OUT. Writing will recover its earlier naïveté, its art quality; our reading vocabulary will be hygienically circumcised and circumscissiled. For the first time in the history of mental optics there will exist a visual Literary Language sharply separated from the Speaking Tongue. Literary language is Optical, speaking language Vocal, and the gap between them must spread till it becomes a gulf. My reading machine will serve as a wedge. Makers of words will be born; fresh, vital eye-words will wink out of dull, dismal, drooling type at startled smug readers here below. New methods crave new matter; conventional word-prejudices will be automatically overcome, from necessity reading-writing will spring full-blown into being. The Revolution of the Word will be all over but the shouting. Reading-writing will be produced not so much for its sonorific sleep-producing qualities as for its mental-eye provoking pleasures.

I have lived with five hundred years of printed books and have felt the same papyrus that Nebuchadnezzar might have touched, and all this time I have lived in loving wonder, a great want-to-know about words, their here and their there, their this and their that, and the most efficacious manner of administering the written word to the patient. The monks in the beginning didn’t do it so badly in their illuminated manuscripts, they retained a little of the healthy hieroglyphic, all Oriental books in ideogrammatic character are delights, early colophons splendid. But what have