In the reading-machine future
Say by 1950
All magnum opuses
Will be etched on the
Heads of pins
Not retched into
Three volume classics
By pin heads

In January 1931, Bob Brown worked with Nancy Cunard's Hours Press to publish Words—two sets of poems printed in a single volume. The book wassubtitled I but bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping. One set of poems was printed in 16-point Caslon Old Face, a classic font style used in all Hours Press publications. The other was relief-printed from engraved plates at less than 3-point size (perhaps, according to Cunard, less than 1-point). Because the subtitle was also printed in the microscopic text, archives, libraries, and bibliographies often mistakenly omit it.

Although Brown was, for Cunard, "at the very center of his time, a zeitgeist in himself," they printed only 150 copies, and the book passed into relative obscurity. It is generally mentioned only as a footnote in discussions of Cunard's life or in reference to Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, Brown’s better-known anthology of experimental textsby modernist writers, including Cunard herself (Cunard, Hours, 177 and 181).

One can place Words at the intersection of three lineages. Nancy Cunard wanted to produce elegant modernist works in the fine-press artists' book tradition that Hours Press helped initiate: "to achieve impeccably clean things with fingers grease-laden" (Hours, 9). Brown wanted to demonstrate how microscopic texts for his reading machine might appear if printed next to poems set in 16-point type. A reading of the book from the perspective of an avant-garde audience places it in the tradition of art- stunts. (In this regard, Brown's friends, George Antheil and Marcel Duchamp, influenced his interest in art-stunts involving machines and mechanisms.) As a performance of reading strategies, Words, with its magnifying glasses and hidden clues, alludes to detective stories or to theparanoid's micrographia and art brut.

Only a handful of scholars have had the opportunity to read Words, which this new edition makes widely available, and even fewer have discussed it outside of a passing mention or footnote (for exceptions, see Dworkin, 2003, or Ford, 1988). The current moment seems ripe for a rediscovery of this work precisely because of contemporary interests in book arts, reading technologies, conceptual art projects, and interdisciplinary modernist studies.

Nancy Cunard, famous for her iconic glamorous fashion with African bangles and bobbed hair-style, was part of a thriving group of small-press publishers in the 1920s, including Contact Editions, Beaumont Press, Ovid Press, Nonesuch Press, Fanfrolico, Seizin, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company, Black Sun Press, Black Manikin Press, and Bob Brown's own Roving Eye Press. She announced Words in a December 1929 edition of transition, the English-language modernist art and literary journal published in Paris. She started talking about the possibility of the project after Brown had sent her a copy of his " beautifully produced" 1450- 1950. The title refers to the evolution of printing, and its meaning was immediately clear to Cunard, a printer; but the poet William Carlos Williams wrote to Brown wondering what the "numerals meant” (Hours, 177; Williams, n.p.).

Cunard saw in Brown's work "another new slant" in the ongoing experiments in reshaping writing by the surrealists, Dadaists, and others (Hours, 177). The design and craft involved in its production make Cunard and her printers more collaborators than simply invisible technicians. Clearly, Cunard embraced the "pristine joie- de-vivre" of the "persistent experimenter" looking for "felicitous discoveries." She and Brown both were "intoxicated by words," yet knew "how to bring them to heel" (Hours, 178). Both shared passions for ethnography, collecting, and—most of all—work. Their intense productivity, with Brown publishing five of his books and Cunard's press producing ten books in 1930 alone, speaks to an atmosphere of expatriate excitement for writing and publishing.

The story of Brown's collaboration with Cunard is, to borrow Hugh Ford's phrases, the "story of how books were made, of how ideas became the words on a printed page," and of how "author and publisher conferred during each step of the production of the book." The lesson that this edition of Words should teach us is that small presses "could and did cultivate an intimacy between authors and publishers as well as a creative atmosphere that large commercial publishing houses, now as well as then, nearly always lack” (Ford, Hours, xv-xvi).

Unfortunately, many literary accounts of the twenties and thirties focus on the personal lives and fashions of artists rather than their work, except to dismiss it all as symptomatic of the scene’s decadence. To Hugh Ford, the historian of these expatriate publishers, books like Words demonstrate "the solid literary achievements of people who for too long, have been either dismissed or glorified, depending on the classifier, as a ‘Lost Generation’” (Ford, Hours, xv). Brown describes the situation in an untitled poem on page 19 of this volume: "But for years I have / Peered through venetian blinds / At poets / Without yet catching a glimpse of / One at work." Indeed, we might know more about what they drank (Brown, for example: beer and wine, not whiskey), and who they had affairs with during the late 1920s and early 1930s than about what they accomplished. Many summaries of Nancy Cunard's life prominently feature her affairs with the co-founder of surrealism, Louis Aragon, or the co-founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara, or the African-American jazz musician Henry Crowder. One appendix to a biography includes a lurid tale about George Moore, the influential poet and novelist, who repeatedly asked Cunard to let him see her naked (Cunard, quoted by Fielding, 188-9).

Biographical summaries recount all these love affairs with important men but few details about the processes and pleasures of the work both Brown and Cunard loved: the "love of printed letters" (Cunard, Hours, 183).

In relation to the self-reflexive poetry about the work and pleasures of printing, both Brown and Cunard had intense, even erotic, connections to their work. Cunard named Hours Press as an allusion to the work and work habits of her friend Virginia Woolf, who, with her husband Leonard, gave Nancy advice about the endeavor she was about to undertake; the Woolfs knew from their Hogarth Press that "Your hands will always be covered in ink." The process of printing and writing are rarely the motif of poetry, but for Cunard, "the smell of printer's ink pleased me greatly, as did the beautiful freshness of the glistening pigment. There is no other black or red like it. After a rinse in petrol and a good scrub with soap and hot water, my fingers again became perfectly presentable; the right thumb, however, began to acquire a slight ingrain of gray, due to the leaden composition" (Hours, 9). They were "looking at possibilities, at possibilities say, of bringing innovations up against some of the consecrated rules of layout" (Hours, 10), which for them had become a kind of prohibition.

Brown's work in publishing and printing and voluminous writing made one line of the opening poem in Words a coda of his life: "words and I are one." He also includes a visual mathematic formula as part of the poem, suggesting a quantifiable and scientific description of the merger of poet and words rather than a mawkish metaphor of two people merging in love.

Cunard always printed in the serif Caslon Old Face type on the heavy Vergé de Rives paper, both of which she acquired in "generous amount" when she purchased a 200-year–old hand-press from Bill Bird, whose Three Mountain Press had already published modernist poets Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and others (Ford, Hours, xii). With her press, inks, paper and type, Cunard quickly established a look for all of the books she published, and she also commissioned covers by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Georges Sadoul, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Elliott Seabrooke, and Len Lye.

Brown's project would throw a wrench into that tidy process and house style. Although Cunard had hoped to design the binding for Words as "a reproduction of a large slab of old ivory, the veining standing out dark on the printed surface, this turned out to be too difficult; the reproduction would not have been sharp enough. So the covers are cream paper boards with a red leather spine” (Hours, 182). The cover design by John Sibthorpe, perhaps the only element that went off as planned, resembles a typewriter poem from the 1950s and 1960s rather than a modernist printing exercise.

No one involved in the project ever thought to give the book’s miniature font a name, since it was a one-off, not produced as moveable type and never used again. The microscopic text might be categorized as an illustration of printed letters or a visual poem about microscopic printing rather than a traditional font or typeface. It seems appropriate, in the context of this reissue of Words, to name this font "Bobbed Brown Condensed," after Gertrude Stein’s appellation “Bobbed Brown”—her witty allusion to Brown’s call in his Readies manifesto to process all texts in a telegraphic cut-up style eliminating all unnecessary words.

The microscopic text, "too small to be read without a magnifying glass" or without using a variant of Brown's proposed reading machine, "strained the ingenuity and perseverance" of the Press's management when they sought type small enough for the micrographic poems (Ford, Published in Paris, 286). The "only solution, a costly one, was to print the miniature poems from specially engraved plates, the whole to measure not more than one-eighth of an inch when completed" (Published in Paris, 287). For Cunard, the project served as "an excellent example of what one plans to do and how circumstances can alter the idea. Many attempts were made to get really microscopic type" (Published in Paris, 183). The originally planned heavy paper stock would not work with the microscopic text that tended to blur as it imprinted in the rougher paper; they substituted a different, smoother, paper stock called Canson-Montgolfier to get a crisp, rather than luxurious, print. The efforts to engrave the copper plates and relief-print the text produced mixed results, with many letters either appearing—even with magnification—as dots, smudges, or typed over.

In Stein's aforementioned allusion, "authors bobbed sentences like a flapper's popular hairstyle: cut short" (Saper, The Adventures of Bob Brown, 66). Cunard refers to her own readies contribution as "condensed" (Hours, 181), and Brown certainly thought much about mass-produced condensed products since he would, in the 1930s and 1940s, co- author many cookbooks with his wife and mother. In Words, the type is “cut short” in an entirely different way: instead of with dashes as in The Readies, it is reduced with microscopic scale. In reference to this cutting-short process, Brown writes in the opening poem, "Operating on words - gilding and gelding them / In a rather special laboratory equipped with / Micro and with scope." Both sets of poems, 16-point and micro, perform a semi-autobiographical illumination of the literary and cultural meanings of printing in both form and content. For Cunard, the poems express the "Bob Brown spirit" and dynamism: "Everything about him had zest" (Hours, 184, 180). The content of the poems often employs an Imagist style to telescope concrete luminous details, like the image of hollow dice, into abstractions about (in the case of the dice) the lessons of Pandora's box and, in general, about art, printing, reading, and life.

The experience of reading Words suggests, in parodic fashion, the miniaturizing of secret messages by spies. (A century after Words, the U.S. government fends off counterfeiters' efforts by using “micro-printing” techniques to produce micrographic lettering; it’s the same strategy Brown used for poetic ends.) Common in actual espionage and military intelligence, the trope of secret messages was a staple of pulp stories. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Brown wrote for the pulps using many pseudonyms—his own version of a secret identity. His most famous and popular story, made into the first serial movie, included episodes with secret messages, intercepted letters, and interpretations of message fragments.

During the early months of World War I, Allen Norton, a friend of Brown’s, was arrested in Liverpool with a bundle of experimental poems and writings because the authorities thought he was “carrying dangerous messages that were clearly written in code” (Brown, Letters of Gertrude Stein, 1). Brown’s first conception of a reading machine, also in that same year, took the code machines of the time as a type of readymade and as a way to avoid censorship even as the microscopic or processed readies would inevitably attract the censors’ bemused attention. In that sense, the machine highlighted the emerging peculiar ways of reading abbreviated code systems: you have to change your pace and focus. We find this abbreviated language in stock market tickertape, shorthand, technical manuals, recipes, and specialized actuarial and accounting codes that came into widespread use in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The microscopic poems in Words, initially planned as smaller versions of the otherwise identical larger poems, became separate works for technical reasons (the publisher could not fit the longer poems in the miniature space). So instead of the reader choosing whether to read the same poem in different sizes, and making the actual reading of the miniature poems a merely imaginative activity, the technical problems led to a different experience in which the poems seem to comment on each other.

For example, the poem "TO A WILD MONTANA MARE" portrays a sex scene in 16-point font for all to read. On the same page, hiding in what looks like a thumbprint or smudge, is a miniature poem about the narrator's lack of Romantic awe when visiting cultural icons like the Sphinx. Printing the sex scene in 16-point type next to the poem about a great cultural wonder of the world in microscopic type pokes fun at censors' arbitrary choices: Why not censor a poem about the lack of appropriate passion and excitement during pilgrimages to the Sphinx or Leonardo's Mona Lisa? Brown uses the unique design (the combination of micro- and 16- point fonts on the same page), and the anticipation of a reader's reactions, for poetic effect.

Brown continued his deconstruction of censorship in his volume Gems, which he printed and published in the same year as Words and dedicated to Cunard in the hope that she would find in it a "lifelong fountain of innocent and exalted pleasure" (Brown, Gems, n.p.). He also begins that collection of found poems with a detailed discussion of Havelock Ellis, whom Cunard also published, and whose books on sexuality were banned, denounced, and burned in England. With this ongoing prohibition in mind, Brown thought of his use of micrographic texts strategically, not ornamentally or neutrally.

The short filler form of the micro-poems was not new to Brown, who plundered his own popular-culture past to produce an avant-garde literature, a kind of pop-vanguard. It was essentially a genre—the “squib”—that launched his career more than two decades earlier. His first series of publications in 1907 consisted entirely of squibs, similar to the found-joke– like mistakes from other publications placed at the bottom of a column in the New Yorker. In one of his newspaper columns, he published jokes about signs one might see on the street, funny ads one might read in the town's paper, or simply comically odd sights in the city: "an up-and-coming clothes cleaner's sign reads, ‘We'll dye for you’"; others that caught his eye (or ear) included "Grinn & Barret, Plumbers," and "Farswego: the name of every streetcar terminal according to the conductor's unintelligible, ‘Far as we go.’" His column, which promoted "Foolsophy," also used this short form in parodic aphorisms: "A man is driven to both drink and suicide ––he walks to work"; "A tack in the hand is worth two in the foot."

One can read visual-social-semantic poetics, or what I call elsewhere “sociopoetics,” in the micrographic poems. In one such poem, titled "Zany Zed's Inarticulate Skeleton,” the alliterative play, the repetition of letters, the capitalization of the alliterating letters, and the allusion to articulated skeletons poetically hint that the visual form and layout (or articulated skeletons) remain mute except in this "zany" comic bit.

In another (untitled) micro-poem (the micro- poems often have no space for a title), the word play involves Louis XV using the bilingual visual pun on Louis quinze (fifteen) as Louis quince (which works visually but not homophonically). One squib pokes fun at British food. Another describes red type on white paper. One describes the natural cynicism of a newspaper man when dealing with words, much like a baker distrusting a pie or a butcher looking at tripe. (Brown saw himself as a newspaper publisher who needed to fill column space with squibs and who distrusted writing with an editor's eye.) Another micro-poem wonders about the relation of thought to type on the page, and yet another complains comically about writing with a fountain pen (using the image as a way to consider the larger issue of writing technologies). The mini-poem "Death of Words" suggests a textual script for a comic book or movie treatment by using all capitals to indicate loud sounds, and em-dashes to suggest a shorthand system much like the system used in the Readies anthology, with its cinemovietone quality. The condensed poems, packed in a small space like the condensed soups that soared in popularity in the 1920s, provide an analogy for the post-book reading experience, with variable magnifications and focus.

In the condensed poem "New York 1930," Brown again illustrates the analogous relationships with other technologies, like cranking Ford cars (a favorite theme of Gertrude Stein's), talkies, telephones, vending machines, audio plugs, phonographs, and the experience of watching a movie of a Rhino braying when someone twists its tail and cranks the camera (perhaps an allusion to Simba, released in 1928, one of the first nature documentaries). The poem uses a staccato style suggesting a series of similar images (wires, cranks) and activities (jiggling, twisting, turning) to produce a new type of cinemovietone poetry.

Changing the focus (literally) to the larger poems, one sees the same satirical intent and a similar focus on printing, reading and writing, through titles like "Lament of an Etcher," "A Grace Before Writing," "Writing," "Sonnet (count the lines)," “I But Bend My Finger In A Beckon and Words Birds of Words Hop on it Chirping" (the poem's title as well as the subtitle of the collection), and an homage to Harry Crosby, the printer- poet. Brown later proposed using the image of the bent finger as part of an animated introduction to his plans for a "poetry TV" series, which was rejected by his agent and never proposed to any network or production company. The finger would bend and the animated words would jump on it and hop around like birds chirping (Brown, "letter," 1951).

There is a multicultural perspective throughout these poems. One, republished in his aptly named Nomadness, personifies Nirganth, a Persian meditation toward a detached sensibility. Brown also makes fun of European national figures, customs and mores, as in a poem about street dogs in the upscale spa town of Royat, in France. One untitled poem expresses a goal of the volume: "In the reading-machine future / Say by 1950 / All magnum opuses / Will be etched on the / Heads of pins / Not retched into / Three volume classics / By pin heads." The opening poem of the collection, about birds of words, is a poetic explication of the process of deflating the long-winded into congealed, condensed constructions.

In this volume, Brown does not give us the sort of clever neologism for his nanowritings that he offered when he coined the term readies to describe processed texts for machinic-reading. Brown sought in Words to demonstrate the processes involved in his planned reading machine; perhaps it was a more accurate demonstration than the anthology of readies for Brown's machine published the year before. Around forty years old when he lived and worked as an expatriate poet-publisher (with his Roving Eye Press in Cagnes-sur- Mer), Brown had already packed many other careers and millions of published words into the years before meeting Cunard. He saw this project as an explicit part of a campaign to announce his reading machine, and he published this volume not as an artists' book but as a demonstration of text preparation suggesting the future mechanics of reading.

The poems allude, in form and content, to the ways his life inflected his peculiar plans for the machine. Brown also worked in publishing and printing magazines, reading the tickertape as a stock trader, writing more than a thousand hugely popular stories for the pulps (where he sometimes worked for H. L. Mencken), book dealing, traveling the world collecting artifacts and learning about cuisine (for the many cookbooks he published after his expatriate years), and writing advertising copy. He had written Imagist and visual poetry since the early teens of the twentieth century, and knew many artists and writers from a decade before in Greenwich Village and the Grantwood artists' colony in the Palisades, New Jersey.

Opening up Words suggests an alternative (untaken) path for word processing and conceptual poetry. When the last line of the first page repeats that other theme of Brown's work, "words and I are one," it suggests also that the reading machine and Brown are one. Brown did in fact sometimes describe himself, with his amazing productivity, as a reading and writing machine, collecting books, reading everything he could get his hands on, and cranking out publications. Brown saw himself and words imbricated one upon the other, with his oystering eyes glued to the page.

Flipping through the book, one might find a poem that focuses on the need for a new poetry more attuned with the technologies of speed than is traditional poetry. In one such poem, Brown announces that "cloddish earthen poetry feet," with the pun on feet suggesting metrical units stuck in the mud, await a change in word production and distribution analogous to the airplane's impact on travel. Although not a new idea, since the Futurists had begun exploring it more fully twenty years before, and even advertising had explored the notion, Brown sought to enter a conversation about the teaching of reading and how mainstream culture published texts.

The effort to conceive and print Words produced poetry demanding a technological solution just to read it; it thus put reading at a further remove from a natural human activity (i.e., you cannot simply read this text, nor can you look at it as art design without meaning). In order for the reader to see the smudge at the bottom corner of the page as a microscopic poem, he or she needs an external apparatus (a machine either as simple as a magnifying glass or as complicated as a computer). The human eye has no zoom function. Where The Readies emphasized the linear motion on the x- axis, Words focuses on the z-axis. Imagine a machine that supersedes the un-aided human eye with scanning and magnification in constant change and motion; this volume presents a print-version simulation, where you toggle between large and small texts.

Reference to the history of micrographic writing, neither explicit nor exact in Words, begins at least by the time of Cicero, who reportedly saw an example of it. By the seventeenth century, it had been used in printing. In terms of using microscopic text to avoid censors, Micrographia (Hooke, 1665; new edition edited by Ford, 1998) discusses miniature writing and its possible utility in sending secret messages. Microfilm was used in libraries before the turn of the twentieth century. The surrealists' interest in miniature writing arose with reference to Jean-Martin Charcot, an influence on Freud, discussing micrographia as a symptom of neurological disorders at the close of the nineteenth century. Miniature books and book collecting were popular around the turn of the century as well. In banking and business, microfilm became more than a novelty or secret in the late 1920s, and those uses inspired Brown. His microscopic print alludes as much to condensed foods as to the precise history of graphic design, and his conception of the history of microscopic printing and writing was filtered through his own adventure-story imagination rather than through a scholar's erudition.

Keeping open the question of Brown’s intent, whether the emulation of a business practice or the production of a Duchampian provocation (Brown having been influenced by Duchamp since 1912), clearly the experiments in reading suggest mechanical or artificial alternatives to the school-taught reading practices in the twentieth century. Before the school reform movement of the 1920s, school primers focused on small literary gems for recitation (Ravitch, 253). Brown takes aim at the censors' purported goal of protecting school-age children from less exalted literary works (like limericks, which seem especially suited to recitation and rote memorization). Mainstream forms of concise writing styles (e.g., text messages, scrolling stock quotes, fine print on products and contracts, etc.) resemble visual poetry more than composition primers. Outside of typography and graphic design, students are not taught the poetics and semantics of font size. When we say "read the fine print," we mean read the content, not the form or tone. In school, we do not teach how to read the fineness (the super-condensed smallness) of these ubiquitous forms of writing.

Brown makes explicit the scientific seriousness of his project. In his descriptions of his machine, he talks about his “recondite research” and “actual laboratory tests” (Brown, The Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, 4, 5). Describing the technical specifications of his machine, he compares it to commercially viable reading machines of the day rather than avant-garde stunts or provocations. What looked like avant-garde art and poetry in Words looks in The Readies like a scientific demonstration of the hyper-concise writing now sent out wirelessly, in reader-decided font sizes, as txt: MEGO ;- )(translation: my eyes glaze over <wink>). Brown would have loved this abbreviated form. He might have written the miniature poems in txt, delivered the poems on an e-reader, and made the small squares of text function like picture-in-picture replicas of the larger poems (as he intended).

Words, then, speculates on the future of reading and references the history of printing.

These descriptions of his intentions and research process speak to the mundane reality of early twenty-first–century media technologies. Interactivity, new formats that do not depend on multiple lines of print, the ability to change and control font size and how fast the text moves, and a shift toward visual (rather than phonetic) texts all seem familiar in the context of twenty-first–century reading and writing technologies. Brown’s work could easily serve as the prophetic description of a newfangled software program that seeks to make reading user-friendly (more portable, in a smaller package, served up wirelessly, hyper-fast, and linked with instantaneous access to larger libraries of information). This potential software would free text, once “bottled up in books,” to deliver variable-focus works for use on a PDA (Brown, The Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, 30). This practical program would teach the user how to switch from phonocentric reading (sounding out each word) to visual reading (changing lens and magnification). Perhaps Brown would be producing infomercials for his nano-poem machine if he lived during the turn of the twenty-first century rather than the turn of the twentieth. There are precedents, after all, for literary and artistic vanguardists to become inventors. George Antheil, the self-proclaimed enfant-Futurist, composer and performer of cacophonous mechanized concerts, and friend of Bob Brown's, invented, with Hedy Lamar, a spread-spectrum system for torpedoes that did not find a popular outlet until recently, when cellular telephony employed it. Moreover, the avant-garde was fascinated with markets, as Duchamp demonstrated when he tried to sell his optical art-toys like a street vendor in front of prestigious art exhibits.

Texts for reading machines appear both in The Readies and in Words. What would the machine look like that was made for texts like Words? The struggle to print Words brings on the dream of a machine (a typewriter or electronic device) that could produce microscopic texts. Although some might convincingly argue that the modernist effort to explore vision and work as separate from personality might have ultimately failed (see, for example, North), Brown dreamt of a machine that would remove vision and reading from one individual's perspective. This nano-reading machine would make the reader's eyes figuratively pop out of his head and, to borrow the title of Brown's first visual poem, float away like "Eyes on the Half Shell" (Brown, Blindman, 3). Whether an impeccable example of a modernist artists' book, an apt analogy for the experience of machine-enhanced reading, or a captivating surrealist art-stunt, Words deserves to find an audience beyond the fewer than 150 vanguardists who got copies in 1931, or the few contemporary scholars reading it in an archive today. We may now be ready to see what was hidden in the fine print of Words, and learn to refocus our eyes on the future of reading as revealed by what once seemed a mere novelty, an avant-garde artwork, a clever joke.