1450-1950

by Bob Brown

Originally published in 1929, Bob Brown's 1450-1950 is a collection of hand-written, "optical" poems." This parodic set of "scratches" extends and challenges the legacy Gutenberg's standardized type set and blurs the boundaries between scribbles, art, and literature. In this new edition, scholar and Brown biographer Craig Saper offers a new introduction to the work with several new contributions from artists, poets, and critics paying homage to Brown's impact on the Beat movement, LANGUAGE poetry, and the field of digital modernism.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Bob Brown, born Robert Carlton Brown, liked to say he had written in every genre imaginable: advertising, journalism, fiction, poetry, ethnography, screen-writing, even cookbooks. He wrote at least 1,000 pulp stories, some of which became the basis for “What Happened to Mary?” the first movie serial, released in 1912. He was on the editorial board of the radical magazine The Masses before founding a successful business magazine in Brazil. His output was so varied and his life so far-flung — he boasted of having lived in 100 cities — that some library card catalogs list him as at least two different people.

Brown was also involved in the expatriate literary community in Paris, publishing several volumes of poetry. While in France, Brown also made plans toward, and wrote a manifesto for, the development of a "reading machine" involving the magnified projection of miniaturized type printed on movable spools of tape. Arguing that such a device would enable literature to compete with cinema in a visual age, Brown published a book of "Readies"---poems by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and others.

He contributed to leading avant-garde journals and wrote, sometimes in collaboration with his wife and mother, some 30 popular books about food and drink, including “Let There Be Beer!” (published after the repeal of Prohibition) and The Complete Book of Cheese. Bob and his family eventually established residence in Rio de Janeiro, where they lived until his wife's death in 1952. Bob soon returned to New York where he re-married, and ran a shop called Bob Brown's Books in Greenwich Village until his death in 1959.

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm hardly an expert on poetry but this seems like a very remarkable bk for when it was originally published in 1929. It's all hand-written & drawn & it has a vitality to it that has nothing(?) to do w/ so-called 'artistic merit' & everything to do w/ ATTITUDE & INTENSITY. One page reads:

"Missionaries

I have thought
a lot
about missionaries

being boiled in
black pots
by black men
and I have always
come to this conclusion
WHY NOT?"

This is like the best of beat poetry before beat poetry existed.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first visual poets in the english-speaking world, Bob Brown made these funny little poems by hand. He also invented the "reading machine," though I have no idea what that machine really was. These word-movies anticipate the concrete poetry idea by a few years, laying the groundwork for what type would do in the 60's. A true ignored genius, Bob Brown was.