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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

$2,000.00

Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Laurance Vail, William Carlos Williams et al.


Bob Brown (14 June 1886 – 7 August 1959) was a best selling American fiction writer, publisher and visionary.

With the advent of talking film in 1927, Brown envisioned the printed book becoming extinct. Time had come to rid readers of inefficient books. To do so, he invented a machine that would allow text to be read extremely fast in a hyper-condensed form. He named these abbreviated texts, with em dashes replacing words: Readies.

He self-published 300 copies of this title, containing works by 42 authors including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, and the first appearance of Paul Bowle’s in a book. This is one of those rare copies.

Categories: Essays, Fiction, First Edition, Limited Edition, Poetry, Prose
  • particulars

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This is one of the limited first edition softcover copies of “Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine” (208 pages), published by the Roving Eye Press, Cagnes-sur-Mer, in 1931.

The green paper cover is in poor condition, with several edge tears and missing edge pieces, parts of the spine’s cover layer missing, and the back cover detached. The inside is much better, with shallow edge curl to a number of pages, most notably toward the front, a number of shallow edge tears, also mostly toward the front, a name written, in ink, at the top of the title/authors page, and colored pencil letters to the border of the frontispiece illustration.

The pages throughout the book’s body are almost uniformly clean, with no significant stains, no fade to the lettering, and none loose or missing. There are no stamps or like attachments. This is a rare complete if flawed copy of this prescient anthology.

The accompanying photos are of this copy.

Shipping | International shipping would be by express insured mail, with a shipping charge of $85.00. US shipping would also be by express insured mail, with a shipping charge of $50.

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