Kirschenbaum, whose introduction to his Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (under contract to MIT Press, scheduled publication Fall 2006) discusses Agrippa and its early reception, provides a bibliographical description of the the copy held by the New York Public Library.

“The purpose of what follows is to make public a reasonably complete physical description of the book, something which appears to be lacking at the present. Indeed, there is a great deal of internet lore and misinformation surrounding the project; Gibson himself, for example, once claimed never to have seen a copy, in turn leading some to conclude none were ever completed—but this statement is belied by the appearance of Gibson’s own signature on the flyleaf of the copy at NYPL. The best technical description to date is from the Center for the Art of the Book; while it is authoritative on bibliographical matters it lacks any description of the book’s actual content.”

Brief bibliographical description of Agrippa concentrating on the physical artifact; created for the Center for Book Arts’s exhibition of Agrippa, NYC, 24 April-19 June, 1993.

“The deluxe edition of AGRIPPA was set in Monotype Gill Sans at Golgonooza Letter Foundry, and printed on Rives heavyweight text by the Sun Hill Press and by Kevin Begos Jr. The etchings were made by the artist and editioned by Peter Pettingill on Fabriano Tiepolo paper. The book was handsewn and bound in linen by Karl Foulkes. The housing was designed by the artist, and the encryption code used to destroy the story was created by (BRASH), with help from several other individuals who will go unnamed. The regular edition of AGRIPPA was also set in Monotype Gill Sans, but in a single column page format. It was printed by the Sun Hill Press on Mohawk Superfine text and the reproduction of the etchings were printed on a Canon laser printer. The book was Smythe sewn at Spectrum Bindery and is enclosed in a clamshell box.
published by Kevin Begos, Jr.”

This article considers the influence that nonlinear texts might exert over more traditional literary analysis.

“Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) displays its script at a fixed scrolling pace on the screen and then encrypts it by a technique cryptically knowns as RSA, rendering it effectively unreadable after that one projection…I must admit to a curious feeling of unease here. Agrippa perversely obeys the logic of cultural capitalism beyond the wildest dreams of publishers: it is the non-reusable book. At the same time it obviously subverts the metaphysics of textual mass production. How? By being a copy that destroys its text, or a text which destroys its copy? Agrippa is a unique lession in textual ontology, a linear text that seems to flirt with nonlinearity, not through its convention or mechanism but through the difference between its used and unused copies. The individual copy-as-text is linear, because there is only one sequence: first, the decrypted scripton once, then the reencrypted on for ever after; but the text-as-copy may turn out to be either of the scriptons and is therefore nonlinear. Rather than accept that this paradoxical result undermines my linear-nonlinear distinction, I contend that by destroying its traversal function it exposes the inherent instability of the metaphysical concept of “the text itself.” thus Agrippa becomes nonlinear only if we choose to accept the “text-behind-the-text” as more real than the physical object that can refuse to be read. As for the rest of our categories, Agrippa ia a rather unusual combination of a static, determinate, and transient text with completely controlled access to scriptons.”

This book explores the concept of interactive and dynamic texts as it manifests in a variety of digital works.

“…If the mere passing of the user’s time causes scriptons to apepar, the text is transient; if not, it is intransient. Some texts (e.g., Gibson’s Agrippa (see Gibson 1992) scroll by their users at their own pace, while others do nothing unless activated by the user.”

“…the text Agrippa is very different from all the others; that is, it has an unusual combination of attributes that positions it far [a]way from the other texts in the three-dimensional space of the three main axes.”

This special issue of the SAQ features fourteen different articles on the subject of cybertexts and cybercultures. Later published in book form by Duke University Press.

The following is a list of articles and authors, in order of this issue’s table of contents: “Flame Wars,” by Mark Dery; “New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo 2000,” by Vivian Sobchack; “Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,” by Erik Davis; “Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book,” by Peter Schwenger; “Gibson’s Typewriter,” by Scott Bukatman; “Virtual Surreality: Our New Romance with Plot Devices,” by Marc Laidlaw; “Chapter 14, Synners,” by Pat Cadigan; “Feminism for the Incurably Informed,” by Anne Balsamo; “Sex, Memories, and Angry Women,” by Claudia Springer; “Back to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” by Mark Dery; “Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts,” by Gareth Branwyn; “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason,” by Manuel de Landa; “Survival Research Laboratories Performs in Austria,” by Mark Pauline; and “Taming the Computer,” by Gary Chapman.

Chapter five, “Congruences and Residues,” provides an explanation and summary of Euler’s fuction, the mathematical basis for programming the code of Agrippa.

“5.5. Euler’s Function…any set of phi(mu) residues, one from each class, is called a complete set of residues prime to mu.” (Facsimile image of excerpted text available in Documents.)

Article offers a thorough description of Agrippa and locates the object in the context of other experimental, electronic texts.

“Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (New York, Kevin Begos, 1992, edition of 350, $450; deluxe edition of 95, $1500) could be a conventional livre d’artiste. Inside a slick metallic box, it’s evocative to a fault: there is a burnt-looking honeycomb board and a distressed newspaper framing a substantial bound volume with a singed cloth cover. The book contains a half dozen etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh (reproduced offset in the large edition)—abstractions in rich sepia tones with plenty of textural and tonal range. But there are many twists. The abstractions convey not formal but scientific information, each representing a fragment of a human genome—an individualized biological blueprint. More immediately apparent, there is brassy prewar advertising imagery obscuring each image.

And then watch as the past gives way. These overprinted images are executed in a slow-dissolve variety of disappearing ink. Within a few hours of cracking the cover they vanish forever. Read on, and Ashbaugh’s abstractions themselves give way to page after page of genome fragments as scientists know them—the letters ACTG in varying combination, printed in mind-numbing four-column series. And deeper still, within a square recess cut into blank pages like some long-forgotten drug stash, is a standard computer disk (DOS and Macintosh version both available). This disk represents something of a small press coup, since it contains a new autobiographical novel by science fiction heavy William Gibson. In Neuromancer and Count Zero, among other titles, Gibson has created an ominous anthro-electronic realm he calls “cyberspace.” And that’s just where Agrippa is headed, for it has a self-destructing virus. Publisher Begos is confident the very great majority of readers can’t prevent the text from fleeing forever into the electronic netherworld as soon as it scrolls by their screen. Farewell conventional books—and conventional collecting, and reading, and remembering. Hello electronic communication.

… William Gibson’s chilling vision of prosthetic consciousness is not the only one to illuminate the role of computers in literature. A central feature of electronic publications is that they unmoor the text and require in various degrees that the authors surrender control over their destinies. Such nested narratives and story branchings have their nearest kin in the rash of recent adventure novels that allow readers to pursue alternate clues and plot developments to various conclusions.”

(For additional excerpts from this review and a refutation of the notion of a “virus,” see Unofficial Cyberpunk FAQ (”the Unofficial FAQ FOR alt.cyberpunk”).

For a letter of 1992 from Agrippa publisher Kevin Begos to William Gibson that refers to this article, see letter.

Keynote address at the conference of Digital Aesthetics, 2003, featuring commentary on Agrippa.

“[o]ne of the most artistically advanced examples of a digitally transient, that is, temporally dependent or adjusted, piece of art…Agrippa is described as a ‘black box recovered from some unspecified disaster’, and instead of meaningful words the pages of the book are filled with DNA -codes – ‘AATAT/TACGA/GTTTG’ and so on. -Yet the allegory seems obvious: just as letters generate semantics, so DNA strings create life that interprets information (or ‘recipes’) in a cycle.”

This essay considers William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy in the context of postmodern discourse.

“Gibson’s novels reveal a postmodern flash of cultures and languages jumbled together, a polyglot world of objects and dscourses.”