Shakespeare wrote plays for his current theatrical business;
others gathered and printed his manuscripts. While he
lived, Brann's writing never saw the dignity of a clothbound
book. They were not written for carefully edited, thrice-
proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground out for the
unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily
set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and
patent medicine testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet
that could be rolled up and stuck through a wedding ring.

Brann's range of literary form was limited by his single
avenue of publication through the columns of a one-man
paper, and varied from the ten-word epigrams of
Salmagundi to the ten-thousand word article or published
lecture. Within this range is evidenced at least three
distinct types of literary composition.

First and foremost in volume and effect is the Philippic or
iconoclastic article, mingling in varying proportions the
resounding musical cadences of Ingersollian oratory and
the pungent, audacious epigrammatic twists on which
Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship, built a more
profitable, if not more noble, fame.

It was as the destroyer, the iconoclast, that Brann best saw
himself, and to this role he devoted a great preponderance
of his time and talent. But there is another Brann, unknown
to many who have conceived him only as an idolsmasher,
an "apostle of the devil," an angry Christ driving out the
defilers of the temple with a lash of scorpion's tails.