bob brown / reading machine

In 1930, an American avant-garde writer Bob Brown published a manifesto, entitled “The Readies,” where he called for a new reading machine that would allow him to continue reading quicker and more conveniently. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around and attach to any old electric light plug and read a hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to. A machine as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio, compact, minute operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll. The machine answering Brown’s manifesto was constructed a few months later by Ross Saunders and Hilaire Hiler. It was revealed in May 1931 at the meeting of surrealist artists in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera.

The artists believed “the machine would be a part of a revolutionary transition to a liberated wor(l)d” (a quote from The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown by Craig Saper). The device was constructed from a breadbox, and included a system of wires and spools to present special texts written and processed for it, called “readies.