The Self-Destructive Book and The Library: Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992-)

Abstract

The evening of the 9 December 1992 was supposed to be remembered as a night when people had gathered and watched live, from their home computer screens, the one-off launch event of a self-destructive book entitled Agrippa (a book of the dead), a project brought together by the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the writer William Gibson. This launch event did not happen, or at least not as planned: instead it turned into a series of local happenings from which Agrippa escaped in multiple forms and survived to this day. Based on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award and undertaken in partnership with the Bodleian Library, which holds the publisher’s archive for Agrippa and two copies of the book, this thesis uses Agrippa as a case study with which to explore an iconoclastic bibliographical category, ‘the self-destructive book’, and how it resonates in the ur-space for the preservation and sharing of books, the library. Through a survey of surviving copies and interviews with the work’s creators and owners, it asks what Agrippa has to teach us about the book and the library as institutions. The thesis is divided into four chapters, following an Introduction that addresses the contexts within which Agrippa emerged, at the time of popularisation of the Internet and amid looming fears of the death of print. In chapter 1 on Methodology, I establish the protocols for my project, arguing that Agrippa as a self-destructive book answers to some of the imperatives of rare book and of limited edition publishing, but that it also aims to upset the standards of this category. I suggest that Agrippa opens up challenges to the ways in which cultural heritage institutions, and the library in particular, perceive the materiality of rare books and the priorities of conservation. Chapter 2 on Mythology highlights how, over the past thirty years, the question of what collectors and cultural heritage agents think they have when they own a copy of Agrippa shaped by the initial publicity coup of 1992. While the book is haunted by claims to self-destruction, it is difficult to pin down the ephemerality of the book. Chapter 3 on Moving Images locates the ephemerality of the analogue element of Agrippa in the prints by Dennis Ashbaugh. Through a survey of the prints in the surviving copies I establish that it resides less in the physical degradation of images than in variations arising from the long ‘in-between’ of the publishing process. Chapter 4 on Automating Reading explores how private and public collectors have worked to keep their options for reading William Gibson’s work open since 1992, in analogue as much as in digital, finding substitutes to control the matter of a poem that has been judged to be troubling in its ephemerality. In my Conclusion I reflect that, to maintain access to a self-destructive book, libraries have had to rely on Internet resources that are threatened by the same phenomenon that first released Agrippa to the public in 1992: the hack.