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.

Contemporary publishing, e-media, and writing owe much to an unsung hero who worked in the trenches of the culture industry (for pulp magazines, Hollywood films, and advertising) and caroused and collaborated with the avant-garde throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Robert Carlton Brown (1886-1959) turned up in the midst of virtually every significant American literary, artistic, political, and popular or countercultural movement of his time-from Chicago's Cliff Dweller's Club to Greenwich Village's bohemians and the Imagist poets; from the American vanguard expatriate groups in Europe to the Beats. Bob Brown churned out pulp fiction and populist cookbooks, created the first movie tie-ins, and invented a surreal reading machine more than seventy-five years ahead of e-books. He was a real-life Zelig of modern culture. With The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, Craig Saper disentangles, for the first time, the many lives and careers of the intriguing figure behind so much of twentieth-century culture. Saper's lively and engaging yet erudite and subtly experimental style offers a bold new approach to biography that perfectly complements his multidimensional subject. Readers are brought along on a spirited journey with Bob and the Brown clan-Cora (his mother), Rose (his wife), and Bob, a creative team who sometimes went by the name of CoRoBo-through globetrotting, fortune-making and fortune-spending, culture-creating and culture-exploring adventures. Along the way, readers meet many of the most important cultural figures and movements of the era and are witness to the astonishingly prescient vision Brown held of the future of American cultural life in the digital age. Although Brown traveled and lived all around the world, he took Manhattan with him, and his New York City had boroughs around the world.