William Gibson & Dennis Ashbaugh

THE BOOK THAT BARELY WAS: AN UNOPENED COPY OF THE BOOK MADE TO DISAPPEAR. 

A provocative exploration of memory and the book in the digital age no less relevant today than when it was issued 34 years ago. Publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. explained in an interview how Agrippa “is a play on a personal family album [named after the “Agrippa” album sold by Kodak]. If you’re looking back to your father or your grandfather or people you didn’t know, you’re basically trying to reconstruct this past that you didn’t have. That’s what Bill [Gibson] was trying to do. Bill and Dennis had this wild idea at the beginning that Agrippa was a photo album from twenty or thirty years in the future, where instead of Kodak snapshots you would have DNA codes of your ancestors or your gene pool, and that you could sit down at night and call them up on the computer” (Americas Society interview). 

Gibson’s poem, which is autobiographical and explores his family memories as filtered through a photo album, is contained only on the diskette and was encoded to erase after a single view. The person who encrypted the disk’s data was a friend of Ashbaugh’s, known to the publisher only as “The Hacker.” 

The printed text consists of a series of letters: “A” for adenine, “T” for thymine, “G” for guanine and “C” for cytosine - nucleotide pairings arranged to represent DNA code. 

Ashbaugh’s etchings are meant to be representations of DNA sequences from the transgenic fruit fly. The intention was for the etchings to disappear after exposure to light, but it’s uncertain whether this was ever achieved.  

The present example has never been opened beyond the lidded box. Although Begos had announced three separate editions, it appears that only two were produced – and only a fraction of 455 total copies he had projected were printed. The present example appears to be a “deluxe” issue in the larger format and with the elaborate fiberglass box. There was also a “small edition,” which was smaller than the present example and with reproduction prints. Very few of either edition are known to exist. 

LITERATURE

Millroy. About Agrippa (A Book of the Dead): A Bibliographic History of the Infamous Disappearing Book. [Vancouver, B.C.]: Heavenly Monkey Press, 2015; Maher, Jimmy. “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead),” September 7, 2018 entry of The Digital Antiquarian blog; Interview with Kevin Begos, Jr. at the Agrippa “The Transmission” launch party, December 9, 1992 at the Americas Society, New York.