0.1 Afterword  (Page 8/9)

With the worsening economy in the early 1930s, and his unfortunate wrong bet on the stock market, Brown would soon return to the States, broke, having to borrow the money for his family's voyage. His story does not end there by any means, but those subsequent chapters of his life are beyond the scope of this brief introduction to his most significant contribution to the modernist literary legacy: the readies and the reading machine.

As applications for his reading-machine platform, Brown's publications of The Readies , Gems , and Words represent one of the most significant contributions to the genre of literary works in which visual design and layout play a determining role in the meaning of the texts. His work was later seen by the Brazilian Noigandres concrete poets, the Beat poets, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as an influence and precursor to their work.

Bob Brown became an avant-garde poet and impresario around 1912—well before the 1930 publication of his manifesto. From 1929 until his death in 1959, some considered him an important avant-garde writer and publisher. His connection to modernist writing, design, and publishing was neither fleeting nor limited to his few years as an expatriate in France. His more than fifty-year career as a writer had him serving as an exemplar for writers associated with both popular culture (movies, pulps, bestsellers, advertising copy, cookbooks, travel guides, magazine publishing, etc.) and avant-garde publishing. Brown's work also illuminates works in popular venues by writers like Joyce or Pound, who are usually studied in terms of experimental writing, and writers crucial to avant-garde publications, like Boyle or Farrell, who are usually associated with popular and politically engaged work. The reading machine has aspects of both parodic performance-art stunts, in the style of Tzara, Duchamp, and Antheil, and a practical tool or product ready to serve a mass market (a precursor to microfiche, Google books, e-readers, and text messaging). It is a truism of literary and art studies that the avant-garde opposes, by definition, mass-marketed products. Can a parodic art-stunt also function as a practical tool? In theoretical terms, can an attack on reading practices and the book's form serve an audience of book readers of canonical text? Does Brown’s project present an intentionally paradoxical formation or does it represent an unresolved contradiction in his project and career? While The Readies did not initiate an avant-garde group or movement, like Dada or Surrealism, dedicated to mechanical forms of reading and processed texts, it now serves as a kind of dubious manifesto presaging and engendering the digital revolution in reading and publishing .

Although The Readies created a sensation among the avant-garde and expatriates, and was greeted with the kind of enthusiastic praise that other more immediately influential manifestoes garnered, the limited run of 150 copies, with no subsequent editions until now, assured that it would pass into obscurity. The two other strikes against Brown—his huge success in popular genres of writing and the great variability in the types of his writing—have made it challenging for literary scholars to find a place for him in either modernist avant-garde circles or in popular culture studies of pulps, movies, and cookbooks. Brown's work as both popular writer and avant-garde innovator makes those genre lines, generally used to divide publishers' lists of books as well as scholars' areas of study (i.e., modernism, popular culture, film and media, digital media, conceptual art, cookbooks, etc.), an irrelevancy. With its publication now, and with the electronic version accessible to a wide audience, The Readies ' significance in literary and artistic history and technology's impact on reading both become more apparent. This manifesto presents a clear and concise statement about the avant-garde's interest in preparing for changes in the sensorium and especially their fascination with the eye's importance in reading relative to the perceived dominance of aurality and interpretation. It also presents the practical side of the avant-garde's desire to intervene in the machinations of everyday life. What if a machine illuminated the visuality of reading hiding in plain sight? Bob Brown's manifesto answers that question and demonstrates its potential.