Readies for Bob Brown's Machine.

Bookseller Notes

This copy signed by Paul Bowles in blue ink at the head of his contribution on p. 80; his first appearance in book-form other contributors include Nancy Cunard, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, F.T. Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Charles Henri Ford, Walter Lowenfels, Eugene Jolas, James T. Farrell, Laurence Vail, John Banting, Peter Neagoe, Robert McAlmon, et al. A radical and innovative book, which provides texts for Brown's pre-digital vision of the e-reader; his machine is a response to the acceleration of the modern world, to which the 'existing medievalism of the BOOK' (p. 177) in the form it has been for centuries is 'an anachronism in this Airplane Age' (p. 204) '[t]o continue reading at today's speed I must have a machine' (p. 177).Brown's long Appendix elucidates the background of his invention, whose primary influences are the ticker-tape and the cinema reel (the name 'readies' is a literary equivalent to 'talkies'): it is a portable machine, with the 'entire content of a book' now on 'a roll like a miniature serpentine that can be put in a pill box' (pp. 177-8), forming a single scrolling line of type that 'runs on before the eye continuously' (p. 184), and can be manipulated by the user sped up or slowed down, enlarged or diminished at the press of a button, with 'full length novels' now capable of being 'optically absorbed' (an act equivalent to, but not the same as, reading) in half an hour when 'taken at a high gear' (p. 179). Brown was, he confesses, more a visionary than a craftsman ('I can't even drive a nail straight'), and so 'more interested in the stuff that is being written for the machine than the machine itself' (p. 197). The contributions are quite various in the form of their experimentation, indicative of the fact that the 'machine' was more of a concept than an object, but they share the properties of concision and ellipticalness reflecting the machine's own exaltation of the notion of economy in both time and space, being both more physically and verbally compact than its antecedent.