Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition

Critical facsimile edition making crucial modernist texts available for the first time since 1931

Restores a rare but highly influential modernist anthology to print in a new critical facsimile edition Provides extensive scholarly commentary, analyses, and newly discovered biographical information, setting the anthology in its broader cultural context Offers the first collection of avant-garde writing designed to be read on a ‘reading machine’ invented by the American expatriate poet Bob Brown Includes both Craig Saper’s new Introduction and a separate chapter on the Contributors and their readies. Saper is the leading scholar of Bob Brown’s work as well as an important scholar of experimental writing, media, publishing, and art

This new edition of Bob Brown’s groundbreaking collection of modernist writing experiments has been out of print since 1931, when Brown’s Roving Eye Press originally published it. Only a few copies exist in archives today. The contributors include major modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti, Eugene Jolas and Ezra Pound, key social realists like Kay Boyle and James T. Farrell and daring queer novelists and artists including Charles Henri Ford and Sidney Hunt.

Providing extensive scholarly commentary, analyses and newly discovered biographical information, this book sets the anthology in its broader cultural context. This is an essential resource for those interested in print and book history, the politics and culture of the expatriate avant-garde and the reading machine’s impact on reading, writing and literacy.