• 1  Robert Carlton Brown, The Readies, Bad Ems, Roving Eye Press, 1930, p. 33.

I request the reader to fix his mental eye for a moment on the ever-present future and contemplate a reading machine which will revitalize his interest in the Optical Art of Writing. Robert Carlton Brown1

• 2  Robert Carlton Brown, The Readies, Bad Ems, Roving Eye Press, 1930. The text was republished in 20 (...)
• 3  Siegfried Zielinski distinguishes three categories of imaginary media. The first category is untim (...)

4In this article, I will focus on one particular example of a reading machine. This machine may never really have existed as such, but it gave rise to a critical reception of some consequence, to the point where it became the central idea at the core of a rhetoric of protest. I refer to the Readies by Robert Carlton Brown.2 As Siegfried Zielinski points out, this singular invention is not so much a dead machine as an imaginary device or medium, that haunted engineers and inventors throughout the 20th century.3

• 4  The text was published in 1994 (republished in paperback in 1998), in the L’Acte de lecture, colle (...)
• 5  Media archaeology is not an entire discipline, it is more a field of research that takes an intere (...)

6I would like to point out that I have already written about this reading machine. I described it in 1992 at a seminar on reading practices.4 I was interested in this machine at the time because reading and writing were so closely bound together in it and that the speeding up of the reading process, a much sought-after objective since the start of the 20th century, did not just involve the transformation of the medium but also the adjustment of the content, meaning the transformation of the way texts were written and the way words relate to one another. It was a global project, with a modernist, radical reach, as it involved renewing the very definition of literature. In this article, I will not approach reading from a semiotic angle, I will examine the media archeologically, reflecting on the devices used in writing and reading practices.5 As such, Bob Brown’s Readies constitute the precursors to electronic eBooks and the digital ecosystem that has allowed for their commercialisation, not unlike Memex by Vannevar Bush, as he forecast the advent of the World Wide Web. They are an integral part of the techno-imaginary world of books, writing and reading.

• 6  Jeremy Norman, “Bob Brown: Visionary of New Reading Machines and Changes in the Process of Reading (...)

9As Jeremy Norman points out, “Written before anyone imagined electronic computers, and even longer before anyone imagined a hand-held electronic computer, one goal of Brown’s vision of new media for reading was saving space, paper and ink through media more compact than traditional printed books.6 His reading machine was intended to allow someone read a ten-thousand-word text in ten minutes, thanks to a new type of printing. The text was to be printed, using the newest of photographic procedures, (for 1930), on rolls of miniature, transparent film that could be transported in pill boxes. These “microfilms” were intended to run along a magnifying glass that measured 30 centimetres. This freed the reader from the book, the need to hold it, turn pages and keep them clean, and from the need to move their eyes from side to side. The writing itself moved, it came to the reader rather than the other way around, which was intended to speed up the reading process.

• 8  Robert Carlton Brown, The Readies, Bad Ems, Roving Eye Press, 1930, p. 37; Robert Carlton Brown, T (...)

10Brown intended to sell the rolls of film in chemist shops or in telephone stores (precursors to video clubs). Above all, he believed that the reading machine would lead to the transformation of writing. In order to develop, this new, fast, effective and cheap reading method required writers to invent new words, to throw out old used-up words. For example, the definite article was to be phased out, along with all conjunctions and words that were not considered to be essential, and replaced by dashes or spaces. As Brown like to say, “Let’s see words machinewise, let useless ones drop out and fresh spring pansy winking ones pop up.”8

• 10  S.R. Winters, “An Invention That May Reduce the Size of Our Books to a Fraction of Their Present B (...)

13This was a device with a magnifying lens that provided the reader with access to text that was printed in miniature on small cards. The cards were slid into the slit on the device and the text was readable through a visor. The benefits of such a device were legion: lower distribution, production and storage costs, savings on paper, easier access to information. In a 1922 edition of Scientific American, available online, it said, “The diffusion of knowledge will be greatly facilitated because even the poorest people will be able to buy the most instructive and entertaining works.”10

• 11  S.R. Winters, “An Invention That May Reduce the Size of Our Books to a Fraction of Their Present B (...)

14One of the issues with this invention was the lens, that required the reader to use only one eye, like on a long-range rifle, which could lead to eye fatigue, headaches, and even squinting. “Admiral Fiske, in answering the suggestions of the possibility of the Instrument causing jaded eyes, throws out the reminder that engravers toil incessantly at their occupations which is of striking similarity to reading by this machine.”11 Despite the Admiral’s denials, the lens of his reading machine did nothing to make reading easier and his invention was not a success.

• 12  Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, New York, Random House, 2001.

15One of the advantages of this machine, which formed the basis of many of these enterprises, was the speeding up of the reading process. At a time when everything seemed to be getting faster (a refrain that has existed for a long time), reading lagged behind, which encouraged the more daring to look for solutions. Fiske’s reading machine promised speedier and simpler access to larger quantities of text. One look through the lens of the machine revealed one hundred and twenty words at once. During a demonstration, Admiral Fiske managed to read 239 words per minute out loud, while the writer from the Scientific American was able to read 287 words silently. Each card could contain ten thousand words on each side. The economies of scale are immediately obvious. It must be said that in the decades that followed, microfilms often appeared as the ideal answer to the storage challenges faced by libraries. Nicholson Baker’s essay Double Fold gives a good account of the damage done to collections of newspapers and books in big libraries in the name of space and conservation in the eighties and nineties.12 Microfilm was sold as the universal panacea, as a technology that could finally replace the book, before it became clear that it was extremely fragile and inflammable. In other words, when it comes to books and their survival, Ray Bradbury is always hovering.

• 13  Bradley Allen Fiske, Invention. The Master-Key to Progress [1921], Charleston, BiblioLife Publishe (...)

16Admiral Fiske was also the inventor of various military technical devices such as the “gun director system,” the “Naval Telescope Sight,” the “stadimeter,” the “turret range finder,” the “torpedoplane” and the “horizometer,” as well as being the author of essays such as The Art of Fighting, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, and Invention. The Master-Key to Progress, which was published in 1921. In this book, the Admiral champions human inventiveness and, above all, a technical and machine-based conception of the world. In the second-last chapter entitled, “The Machine of Civilisation,” he argues this point by affirming straight off that: “The originating work of inventors of all kind […] have built up a Machine of Civilisation that is surpassingly wonderful and fine.”13 But it is clear that in order to protect and preserve this wonderful machine of civilisation that could go off the rails at any time, you need good, loyal soldiers who will ensure that progress continues by working to develop it while protecting its rear (against Bolsheviks and pacifists, the latter seen as much more dangerous than the former!). The reading machine is yet another link in the development of this machine of civilisation, a stage that is all the more crucial as it touches the human mind, which is generally averse to any approximation of its operating methods.

• 14  Dead Media Project. [Online] http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-numeric.html [accessed 18 Februa (...)

17Despite their initial promise, Bob Brown’s Readies never made it to the market. They are now consigned to the category of amusing, even original inventions, that have ultimately been abandoned, even though their spirit lives on. They are even listed in the Dead Media Project database where members of the website’s mailing list compile all obsolete or forgotten communication technologies. The Readies feature in the database, as does the Milton Bradley Vectrex, the Polyrhetor and the Wilcox-Gay Recordio.14 But we would easily argue that the Readies do not constitute a dead media, but that Brown’s imaginary machine merely appeared prematurely. Indeed, Brown’s objective to revamp how we read and learn, by making reading devices more effective, faster and more compact, was legitimate and extensive research has continued in the area. After being forgotten for almost sixty years, his invention is once again beginning to garner interest, with the development of a range of digital reading devices.

• 15  For Ulrich Küchler also, the originality of Brown’s approach comes from this holistic approach. Th (...)

18It must be said that it is not only modernist historians who take an interest in the Readies, but a much broader audience that takes an interest in the impact media technologies have on reading, a process we have taken for granted for so long. As such, Brown’s project can be seen as a real precursor to current digital practices. The instant messaging apps that we all have on our phones and the brevity of style they require, eBooks that use electronic ink having freed themselves from the codex, if we forget this surprising nostalgia for the page, memory keys, databases, the Internet, the ecosystem that we now call digital culture, all started off in Brown’s work as some form of approximation. He did not restrict his work to a reading machine, he wanted to create a complete cultural practice. His machine was not intended to merely transmit a text that didn’t budge, as if this technical revolution was not going to change anything about the way it was written, his machine was to force an entire reworking of the process, and, in doing so, of writing itself.15

• 16  Robert Carlton Brown (dir.), Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Roving Eye Press, 19 (...)

19Marshall McLuhan accustomed us to thinking in terms of complex links between medium and message. Bob Brown had anticipated this, having understood that not only were new sentences and syntactic structures needed, but new discursive approaches had to be worked out as text would now only appear on one line. Brown was keen for input when developing his invention and he contacted over forty writers including Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, to create content for the Readies. He even published a book that gave a glimpse of this new textuality and, as a result, this new reading method.16

• 17  Robert Carlton Brown, The Readies (1930), ed. Craig Saper, Houston, Rice University Press, 2009, p (...)
• 18  Jennifer Schuessler, “The Godfather of the E-Reader,” The New York Times, 8 April 2010. [Online] h (...)
• 19  The project is presented on Behance. [Online] https://www.behance.net/gallery/8243643/the-readies (...)

20The academic Craig Saper, who specialises in the links between textuality and technology, republished Brown’s book in 2009; his interest comes from a media archaeology approach rather than a reading and textual theoretical one, in as much as Brown’s machine is a precursor to eBooks and tactile tablets. Saper is fascinated with machines that provide an alternative to the codex and to traditional forms of representation, and he associated the Readies with the retro steampunk aesthetic. He tells us, “The steampunk aesthetic […] would today embrace Brown’s clunky futuristic machines, perhaps with the slightly modified name MachinePunk, revelling in cogs, gears, magnifiers, and spools running on a whirring electric motor.”17 Saper takes the fantasy further and even goes as far to imagine possible commercial success for the Readies, having passed the prototype stage to become the latest gadget. The interest for this modernist machine, where Jules Verne meets the Futurists, according to Jennifer Schuessler,18 who actually considers Brown to be the Godfather of the modern E-Reader, is not waning. Kamaria Penn, a graphic artist from Cruz Bay in the Virgin Islands, brought out an elegantly designed brochure in 2013 that contains what is intended to be a visual interpretation of Brown’s Readies. The project, which is made up of twelve pages folded like a fan, exploits the futuristically dated nature of the invention, complete with collages and cogs.19 This is not merely a recreational project, it is a supplement, a complementary object that doesn’t teach us anything new about the machine, except its new-found relevance in a digital context. It is a nostalgic version of the Readies, that accentuates the manifesto dimension of the text.

• 20  There is a presentation of the project on the artist’s website, Studio Libeskind. [Online] https:/ (...)
• 21  [Online] http://readies.org/ [accessed 18 February 2018]. In fact, the emulator that is currently (...)
• 22  Bertrand Gervais, “Imaginaire de la fin du livre. Figures du livre et pratiques illittéraires,” Li (...)

21It must be said that it would have been interesting to recreate the Readies in the same way that Daniel Liebskind recreated Agostino Ramelli’s reading wheel that was originally designed in the 16th century. At the Venice Biennale in 1985, Libeskind presented “Three Lessons in Architecture: The Machines” made up of The Reading Machine, The Memory Machine and The Writing Machine.20 These monumental machines provide an unexpected perspective on the human functions that have shaped our civilisation, memory, writing and reading. In fact, Craig Saper attempted to do with Brown’s invention what Libeskind did with Ramelli’s, in proposing a digital version of the Readies, re-mediatising the reading machine using emulator software. On readies.org, the project website, there is a device that lets us try out the Readies21for ourselves. There is no sign of microfilms and lenses, rolls of film or projection mechanisms, they have been replaced with a convivial interface that scrolls the text onscreen on a white background. 46 texts have been uploaded to the site, all extracts from the 1931 edition of Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine. When the user choses a text—We Came: A History by Gertrude Stein for example—, the text scrolls from left to right like a roll of film. The user can stop, restart, speed up or slow down the text using a roller that is numbered from 1 to 60 —the final figure represents the fastest speed—, and can go back from left to right, against the flow of the text. The sequences are endless. Obviously, the faster the text scrolls, the harder it is to read, as the movement of the words prevents the eyes from focusing. The Readies add movement to something that is usually immobile, and the emulator renders this feeling well. Words are not meant to move around a page, except in the case of kinetic poetry. They stay still and it is up to the reader’s eye to find them. With the emulator of Brown’s machine, words scroll in both directions. They are in movement and become gradually illegible, the very act eludes the reader. The text is no longer to be read, it is to be looked at. It is just a representation of a text, a representation that reveals its presence—we see it scroll on the screen—and its absence—we can no longer read it.22

• 24  Craig Saper, “FCJ-105 Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch ‘Reading’ Machine, 1931,” The Fibercult (...)

23The emulation of the Readies shifts Brown’s enterprise, making it relevant; it doesn’t just take on a modernist project and give it an update thanks to the Internet, it adjusts it to contemporary practices, notably those associated with rap and scratching, that turn text from a linguistic form into an artistic material. Saper quotes William Burroughs’ The Invisible Generation, and Burroughs himself used to play vinyl albums back to front to listen to the hidden words, and closely associates the scratching techniques of rappers and djs with the “un-reading” and craziness that the Readies allow. As he says in the article we quote, “scratch is not an ornamental value distorting the text, but rather a crucial way of reading, uncovering the ghosts of meanings lurking in plain sight.”24 You need to scratch the text to take away its varnish, and, in a way, strip it clean.

• 26  Mark Amerika, Remixthebook, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

24The digital emulation of the Readies makes them the emblem of a practice of re-appropriation and deflection, of the subversion of established order, in cultural terms but also in economic and political terms. For Saper, the Readies are to society what scratch is to music. The role of emblem is one that the academic knows well, as he has chosen the pseudonym dj readies for some of his projects, where the initials dj indicate explicitly that the Readies do not so much refer to Bob Brown’s machine, but to its re-mediatisation by Saper. They are his own Readies, his own practice of scratching as an interpretative strategy, a little like when Mark Amerika’s remix becomes a textual analysis.26

• 27  dj readies, Intimate Bureaucracies, Santa Barbara, Punctum Books, 2012.

25Like a real “ghost in the machine,” dj readies immersed himself in the spirit of Brown’s machine and turned into a revolutionary figure, a visionary who is ready to rework the very foundations of our societies. Saper even wrote a socio-poetic manifesto using the pseudonym of dj readies, that is not unlike Brown’s call for the renewal of artistic practices. The oxymoronically titled Intimate Bureaucracies,27 provides an historic view of the present time, envisaged retrospectively as a turning point, in the same vein as Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, turned toward a past that is, in fact, our own present.

• 28  dj readies’ reading-writing and variational mimicry position takes an “illittéraire” approach. Thi (...)
• 29  Saper’s fascination for Brown’s modernist project led him to write a biography of Bob Brown (Amazi (...)

27Craig Saper’s slow process of appropriation transformed a modernist project into a practice connected to digital aesthetics, marked by scratching, remixing and subversive practices.28 His promotion of Bob Brown’s project was not just confined to making an emulator available online, or to highlighting the poet-inventor’s life and work,29 it also saw him take up the baton, looking to renew culture itself, just as Brown intended. dj readies, in fact, appears as a new avatar for the modernist project. But this update occurs through shifting and transformation. There was a gradual shift from the faithfulness to the original project, as evidenced by the publication of the original book from 1930, to variational mode, as the book title (The Readies) became the name of a figure who illustrated its very spirit (dj readies), and the machine itself became a principle for the production of signs. The movement Brown initiated and hoped for thus reaches its maximum amplitude and becomes an actual flux.