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Welcome to Rice University Press
Before there was Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, there was Bob Brown. Back in 1930, Brown foresaw the day when reading would be done on devices that brought with them a tendency to smash and recombine language into a kind of grotesque shorthand. With one foot in the Surrealist/Dadaist camp of Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, and Guillaume Apollinaire—all of them friends of his—and the other in the relatively mainstream world of his friends Gertrude Stein, James T. Farrell, and Kay Boyle, Brown exerted a considerable influence on some of the most important literary and artistic figures of his time. The Readies—a parodic, playful announcement of Brown’s imagined invention of a new reading machine that would require writers and readers to reduce language to “smashum” words and to eschew use of bulky adverbs, adjectives, and countless other unnecessary words in the new age of streamlined communication—now stands as one of the most remarkable examples of accidental prophecy in the history of literature.
Rice University Press is bringing The Readies back to light as part of its Literature by Design series, with a fascinating Afterword by Craig Saper, one of the world’s leading scholars on texts and technology.
Rice University Press has returned from a decade-long hiatus to explore new models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. Our publications are viewable on line, for free, and available in printed-book form at reasonable cost. Editorially, we operate as a traditional university press does, subjecting submitted manuscripts to rigorous peer review, and thoroughly editing our books for publication; but our publishing and marketing operation is experimental and highly non-traditional. The latter circumstance allows us to evaluate manuscripts purely on their intellectual merit, without regard for production costs or potential market. Feel free to explore our site and learn about our revolutionary approach to academic publishing.
