The Agrippa Files » 2005

Publicly Accessible Copies of Agrippa

Three copies of Agrippa (a book of the dead) are known to be in the collections of libraries and museums: the New York Public Library in New York, NY < http://catnyp.nypl.org/ >, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI < https://www.library.wmich.edu/ >, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England < http://www.vam.ac.uk/nal/catalogues/ >. It is noteworthy that neither the Library of Congress nor the British Library owns a copy.

The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York < http://library.whitney.org/ > has a promotional prospectus of Agrippa.

First Mock-Up of Agrippa (Jan.-Feb. 1992)

Item #A9. Promotional mock-up of Agrippa (a book of the dead), created January-February, 1992.

Facsimile Image
Variant photo (with box-case)

The mock-up was made by artificially distressing a used book (not the eventual Agrippa) and cutting a cavity into its back pages to hold a disk labeled “AGRIPPA.” The mock-up lacks Dennis Ashbaugh’s etchings, and features the text of some old used book (not the DNA sequence text of the final editions of Agrippa).

Agrippa Files Editorial Team

A Transcriptions Project

The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site created in 2005 by a team of researchers participating in the Transcriptions Project on literature and information culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, English Department. Photos of the book and scans or transcriptions of unique archival materials are used by permission of the book’s publisher, Kevin Begos, Jr.

Alan Liu

Project leader, General editor, site administrator/CSS co-designer
Professor, English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Research Interests:
New media literature and art; information culture; British Romantic literature and art; literary and cultural theory
Home page

Paxton Hehmeyer

Co-editor, Bibliography
Ph.D. student, English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Research Interests:
Early Modern English literature; transitions to print culture and the history of the book; the early English nation-state

James J. Hodge

Bibliographical Description of Agrippa; liaison with library and museum holders of copies of Agrippa
Postdoctoral Associate, English Dept., Duke University (M.A., English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Ph.d., Language & Literature, University of Chicago)
Research Interests:
The history and theory of media from the late nineteenth century to the present, pre-cinema, and literary and cinematic modernism.

Kimberly Knight

Editor, Agrippa section; image editor; Flash work; video editing
Assistant Professor, Emerging Media and Communication Program, University of Texas at Dallas (Ph.D., English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara)
Research Interests:
Media and cultural theory; digital and information culture; new media literature and art; popular culture; social media.
Home page

David Roh

Original site administrator and designer, CSS co-designer; contributor to Archival Documents
Assistant Professor, English Dept., Old Dominion University (Ph.D., English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara)
Research Interests:
New media studies, law and literature, and transnational studies.
Home page

Elizabeth Swanstrom

Editor, Archival Documents; Co-editor, Bibliography
Assistant Professor, English Dept., Florida Atlantic University (Ph.D., Comparative Literature Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara)
Research Interests:
Digital culture and electronic literature. History of science. Media theory. Twentieth-century American and Latin American literature
Home page

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Though not a member of the original editorial team, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, who is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park, and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, has been a major contributor to the project. (See Acknowledgements.)

Highlights

"The surface of the top case is irregular, distressed, and looks as though it has been unearthed from the debris of some future catastrophe, a kind of relic from the future. Its size and weight do not allow for casual reading/viewing and therefore demand that one recognize its sheer artifactuality. . . ."

—James J. Hodge, "Bibliographic Description of Agrippa"

(Full text)

"The first trace of text from “Agrippa” (the actual poem){1} on the public internet I can isolate is 21 May 1992, 16:05:30 PST, when Tom Maddox—fellow cyberpunk, Gibson confidant, and then USENET stalwart—began including the line “I swear I never heard the first shot” in his message signature file. It was tantalizingly attributed to “Wm. Gibson, ‘AGRIPPA: a book of the dead’.” Pointedly perhaps, his post that spring day was to a thread on rec.arts.books that had arisen in response to some advance publicity for Agrippa, then being erroneously described as a short story. Maddox continued to use the line throughout the summer and fall, but dropped it immediately after the events described below placed the text in general circulation. . . ."

—Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text"

(Full text)

"But we do know that the work is indeed a testament, compendium, or edition of the generalized destructivity of the twentieth century—the first work, as it were, copy-edited by bomb. Nor is the catastrophe over and done with so that we can expect the trauma to be stabilized. A persistent radioactivity of destructivity continues. We first notice it when Ashbaugh’s images (at least as the book was originally conceived) alter in appearance like some picture of Dorian Gray updated to the processes of pixel-rot, gene-splicing, or molecule-creep that are the usual symptoms of cyberpunk’s fetishization of digital, biotech, and nanotech fungibility. . . ."

—Alan Liu, Excerpt from The Laws of Cool

(Full text)

Highlights