William Gibson’s poem played from a 3½-inch diskette on a 1992-era Mac computer running the System 7 operating system. When the diskette ran, the text of the poem scrolled up the screen (accompanied by infrequent sound effects: a camera shutter click, a gun going off) while an encryption program on the diskette encoded each line and made the poem “disappear” after its first reading.
      On December 9, 2008—the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting Agrippa—The Agrippa Files was aided by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, in unveiling an emulated run of the poem based on a bit-level copy of an original diskette loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff. The copy was played on a computer with software emulating the functions of a 1992-era Mac. For a discussion of the forensic process by which the code was accessed and emulated, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

The Poem Running in Emulation »
Context & Related Items

Fading Ink Simulation »
Context

Agrippa the book contains a diskette buried in a hollowed-out cavity. When played in a 1992-era Mac computer, the diskette scrolls a 305-line poem by William Gibson unstoppably up the screen once, then performs an encryption-like effect on it that makes it  “disappear” for all but the most determined hacker.
Gibson’s text is a trans-generational memory poem about his father’s and his own youth—the father captured by a camera and a 1920 Kodak “Agrippa” brand photo album; the son reflecting upon the interface for a vanished world thus provided by the “mechanism.” Disappearance is a central theme (“Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite / Now lost”). But the poem reimagines blurry human disappearance as an effect of sharp, decisive, binary transitions in an existential “the mechanism” (“The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this”). Beyond elegy, the mechanism—which abides only in the moment, and so “forever”—also knows how to laugh (“tonight red lanterns are battered, / laughing, / in the mechanism”).
Currently, the Agrippa Files does not have permission to reproduce the full text of the poem. Many wild copies of the text exist on the Internet. The official copy is on William Gibson’s Web site.

Additional and detail photos of the Archive-1 copy of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

Artist Dennis Ashbaugh intended to print antique newspaper and photographic equipment catalog advertisements of technological artifacts (TV, phone, magic lantern, etc.) in “disappearing” ink over his copperplate aquatint etchings featuring DNA-gel motifs (not actual DNA stain patterns but aesthetic renderings). Exposing the pages to light or air were to have made these “overprints” gradually vanish, leaving behind just the underlying etchings. The art would thus have matched William Gibson’s disappearing poem, which disappears into encrypted code when played.
      However, while some extant copies of the book contain overprints created in uncured photocopy toner as a gesture toward the original idea, technical problems prevented the implementation of the fading ink. The uncured-toner images blur over their base etchings and stain facing pages, but they remain.

Bibliographical descriptions of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

The Deluxe Edition of Agrippa comes in a heavy, distressed case. In the honeycombed bed of the under-case, wrapped in a shroud, lies the 11⅛ x 15 ⅞ x 1⅛ inch book, whose title is hand-burned into the cover. The Deluxe Edition contains 63 viewable pages with ragged, sometimes scorched edges, including copperplate aquatint etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh alluding to DNA gel patterns and body text pages consisting of dual, 42-line columns excerpting a DNA sequence from the bicoid maternal morphogen gene of the fruitfly. Page 63 (and another underlying 20 pages glued together) has a hollowed-out cavity holding the diskette with William Gibson’s poem.
      The Deluxe Edition was originally priced at $1500 (later $2000). An unknown number of copies (fewer than 95) are extant; three are known to be held by public libraries or museums. Each copy is partly unique because of handmade or hand-finished elements. (See “Bibliographic Description”.) Photos selected for this site are from the “Archive-1” copy provided by the publisher.

The Small Edition of Agrippa (a book of the dead) has not been physically examined by the editors of The Agrippa Files site. The Center for Book Arts refers to it as the “regular edition” as follows: “The regular edition of Agrippa was also set in Monotype Sans Gill, 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” (Center for Book Arts online statement).
      The Small Edition was intended to be sold at a cheaper price of $450. However, according to the publisher, most of the print run was cancelled after being produced. An unknown number of copies are extant; one copy is known to be publicly accessible (Waldo Library, Western Michigan University). See “Bibliographic Description” for a fuller overview of Agrippa and exact specifications.

Work with book in Virtual Lightbox

Early or unique prototypes, mock-ups, and prospectuses for Agrippa (a book of the dead)