1450–1950: The Gutenberg Galaxy According to Bob Brown

In 1929, the Paris-based Black Sun Press (formerly known as Editions Narcisse) run by Caresse and Harry Crosby published a slim volume of hand-drawn images and handwritten texts by a fellow American named Bob (Robert Carlton) Brown. Titled 1450–1950, and printed in a run of 150 copies, Brown's book is the very antitype of the high-end books that the press is known for.¹ Printed by the Parisian "Maître-Imprimeur" Roger Lescaret and using only the optimum quality papers and inks, the Black Sun Press titles by, among others, James Joyce and Ezra Pound are notable for the quality of their production.² Compared to these specimens of what Jerome McGann considers modernist extensions of "the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of Printing," Brown's manuscript is comparatively amateurish, and, at times, illegible.³ Brown's "whimsical, instinctively deconstructive picture poems in holograph," as Cary Nelson describes them, pay little heed to typographical propriety or bibliographical decorum.⁴ As a result, the "categories of high art, seriousness, representation, and literariness" are, Nelson suggests, "all at risk" in 1450–1950 (173). So too is the sanctity of the book itself. To use Brown's own trope, 1450–1950 is the distracting "FLY SPECK" on the "NEW" typeset page of modernism.⁵ But as well as questioning the dominance of typography in modernism's "Revolution of the Word," Brown's figurative fly speck also foregrounds a series of racialized and gendered assumptions that have not only tarnished (indelibly so) but also enabled what McGann calls "the visible language of modernism" (Black Riders).

Fig 1.

Bob Brown, "I LIKE LOOKING BACK," 1450–1950, ed. Craig Saper (1959, rpt. Baltimore, MD: Roving Eye Press, 2015). Permission to reprint "I LIKE LOOKING BACK" from Bob Brown's 1450–1950 in the 2015 edition granted by Craig J. Saper based on Jonathan Williams's Jargon edition of 1959 and with special acknowledgement of Bob Brown's great grand-, and grand-, children.

1450–1950 therefore constitutes a prolegomenon to the new reading technologies that Brown would subsequently promote in The Readies.⁶ If, as Jessica Pressman claims, these later essays and books of Brown's "invite us to consider how reading has a medial history that is part of literature and literary history," then 1450–1950 is itself indexical of the prejudices and discriminations tacitly shaping this history.⁷ Building on Michael North's ideas regarding the utopic scope of Brown's visible language, and the way in which "race is intrinsic to his innovations," this essay examines how Brown's problematic representations of race and gender in 1450–1950 highlight a broader set of assumptions concerning otherness in the materiality of print.⁸

By reflecting on its own material processes of expression, and by subverting the typographic medium of print, 1450–1950 draws attention to some ideological biases that are deeply impressed in the medial history of Western literature. The "recursive relationship between literature and reading machines," including Brown's Readies, Pressman writes, "opens up new directions for writing literary history" (Digital Modernism, 77). Without contesting such a claim, the imbedded prejudices evident in 1450–1950's own medial history of the book reminds its reader that, in order to open up "new directions for writing literary history," the recursive relationship between literature and literacy also requires a level of re-medial intervention that will heed the errors and omissions in extant reading practices, technologies, and mediums.

Colophon

In 1959, two small presses associated with the New American poetry—Jargon in North Carolina and Corinth Books in New York City—copublished a new edition of Brown's book. The initiator of the new edition, Jonathan Williams, had recommenced Jargon while a student at Black Mountain College, publishing fellow Black Mountaineers such as Charles Olson. It was also at Black Mountain where Williams first encountered 1450–1950. Caresse Crosby, having published Olson's Y&X in 1950, brought with her a rare copy of Brown's book while visiting the campus. The scarcity of Brown's "utterly...