Bob Brown was successful in almost all his many and varied pursuits. Journalist, stockbroker, publisher, novelist, poet, editor, culinary authority, world traveler, and member of the avant-garde in Greenwich Village and Paris, he was a colorful and energetic figure who also developed a reading machine that he hoped would revolutionize reading and writing. His ideas on writing, together with his own optical poems, cast an interesting light on the modernist "Revolution of the Word."

Robert Carlton Brown was born in Chicago, Illinois, into a family that surrounded him with the printed word at an early age. His father, Robert Carlton Brown, published new books and collected rare ones; his mother, Cora Bracket Brown, later collaborated with her son on most of his culinary books. Bob Brown graduated from Oak Park High School and later attended the University of Wisconsin with the class of 1908, but neither experience affected him...