Roving Eye Press is a peer-reviewed scholarly press dedicated to re-issuing works by Bob Brown (1886-1959).

"Of the many Americans who helped to shape the cultural explosion we call Modernism, few came up to the mark of Bob Brown for sheer 'esprit' and intellectual daring. To read him is to know what intellectual freedom could or should or might truly mean."

~Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia & author of the Romantic Ideology , The Textual Condition , and Radiant Textuality

Roving Eye Press

1928/2014

Bob Brown’s life-long passion for publishing in every imaginable form, genre, and medium is instructive for anyone who seeks to appreciate the rapid changes in reading and publishing in the twenty-first century. And, this new Roving Eye Press is named in honor of Brown’s press and his fascinations with processed texts, tele-vistic distribution, and his dreamed of electronic literacies. Brown’s work as a publisher did not simply package poetry and essays; for Brown, printing, publishing and distributing books and magazines was a type of literature by design. The foundation of the humanities now faces a similar shift toward recognizing literacy and meaning as inextricably linked to information design – we need a “roving eye” rather than a central perspective. Brown’s life-long fascination with the poetics involved in multiple reading machines, from ticker-tape machines to film projectors to his own microfilm-like machine, will help us navigate the contemporary flood of platforms and reading devices that seem to suggest that we will have to have multiple and mobile perspectives ourselves. Not one singular perspective, but a roving eye.