"That Can Never Be History": Gertrude Stein and the Speed of the Reading Machine

Thank you for hurrying through.

—Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation (1932)¹

"I am deep in a treatise on history," Gertrude Stein wrote in a letter dated August 1930. "What is history they make history it's being done with a treatise and messages from history I think you will like it it is solemn and it pleases me."² The "you" at the other end of this letter was Bob Brown, a fellow American expatriate Stein had befriended a year earlier. Stein's letter describes a work-in-progress that she would later submit to Brown for an unusual collection. "Will you please write something to be read on a reading machine," Brown asked in September. "The anthology wouldn't be complete without you."³

Stein was already an enthusiastic supporter of Brown's invention, which she first learned of by reading the manuscript of his book titled The Readies (1930), a term Brown coined after the "lively talkies."⁴ In both the book and an essay featured in the June 30, 1930 edition of transition, Brown staked out his place as the "Godfather of the E-reader."⁵ "To continue reading at today's speed," Brown writes, "I must have a machine. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to" (fig. 1). As Brown described it, the machine would be as light and compact as a portable phonograph, typewriter, or radio and would operate by electricity. On strips of "transparent tough tissue" no bigger than a typewriter ribbon, entire novels would be photographically reproduced in linear, microscopic type. Readers would feed these "reading films" into the machine, which would unroll the text beneath a small magnifying glass (The Readies, 28). This cinematic apparatus would relieve readers of the "cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean, jiggling [their] weary eyes back and forth in the awkward pursuit of words from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, all over the vast confusing reading surface of a columned page" (The Readies, 29). Speed and mobility: Brown sought to remake the slow, contemplative act of reading in the image of the machine age. His manifesto outlines this goal with a futurist bravura. Where George Antheil had modernized music, Constantin Brancusi sculpture, and James Joyce writing, Brown planned to bring the "cumbersome" act of reading into his "aeroplane age" with a device designed to speed up the word (The Readies, 28). The machine would recast literature "at the speed rate of the present day," turning book-of-the-month clubs into "Book of the Day" or "Book of the Hour" or "Dozen a Day" clubs.⁶ Readers could control how fast the small strips of text went by, but Brown repeatedly emphasized that the machine would be built to take advantage of the "natural celerity of the eye and mind," liberating reading from what he considered its languorous connection to sound and voice (The Readies, 29).⁷

Stein would complete her "treatise on history"—a prose poem titled "We Came. A History"—with Brown's machine in mind. She would send Brown the final manuscript in 1931, adding that it had turned into "a study in movement and not unsuccessful" ("Letters of Gertrude Stein," 8). Stein's avowed investments in movement and in a literature written for the eye rather than the ear situate her readie as an ideal contribution to Brown's project. The depth of this poem's connection to the reading machine stems, too, from Brown's debt to Stein. In his appendix to the anthology, titled Readies for Bob Brown's Machine (1931), Brown traces the origins of the reading machine back to his experiences working as a freelance writer, watching countless films, and "pioneering in the ideas of business" before explaining that it was not until 1914, the year of Tender Buttons, that the concept for the machine took shape: "I...