Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections here at the Bodleian.
And welcome to everyone in the room.
For those who are joining us online, we've been really delighted at the interest shown in this symposium,
which promises to be great fun over the next couple of days.
So in 2011, the Bodleian was donated an archive documenting the making and reception of Agrippa,
A Book of the Dead. It's among our most studied modern collections.
The donor was Kevin Begos, who, along with the writer William Gibson and artist Denis Ashbaugh,
stood behind the creation of this most provocative of books.
I got to know Kevin over the years and was very sad when he died in 2021.
He was very kind to me and to the Bodleian, and I hope this symposium does a little to celebrate his memory.
So over the next two days, we will hear from many people who've been involved in the history of Agrippa from its point of origin to the present day.
I want to thank everyone who has agreed to participate, particularly those who have woken up very early to be with us on the other side of the pond.
Nothing about Agrippa is predictable,
and organising a symposium has thrown up some tremendous surprises, which I hope you'll enjoy along the way.
There's one person to whom we owe particular thanks, and that is Justine Provino, who has organised this event.
Justine is a DPhil candidate at Jesus College, Cambridge.
whose research on Agrippa has been a pleasure to supervise jointly with Jason Scott Warren,
Director of the Centre for Material Texts at Cambridge University, and we will hear from Jason tomorrow.
As well as many individuals there are organisations to thank.
We would not be here without the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Faculty of English and the Centre for Material Texts at Cambridge,
Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Centre for the Study of the Book here at the Bodleian.
We're also delighted that this symposium has been combined with the DF McKenzie Lecture, which is being given by Matt Kirschenbaum at 5:00.
Some brief housekeeping. If there's a fire alarm, there are two exits to this room, one front, one down the stairs at the back.
The program's full and tightly scheduled. In terms of questions,
we will try to take some after the second session today, and tomorrow
we will devote as much of the closing session as possible to taking questions and having discussion.
So those in the room, you might want to send your questions for that session tomorrow and those online send questions at any time to the Q&A function,
and we will do our best to gather and read out selection of these tomorrow.
So without further ado for our first panel, we are going be introduced -- and this is an amazing piece of work that Justine has accomplished --
We're going to be introduced to all the surviving copies of Agrippa identified in institutional collections, here and in the States,
and each speaker will pass on to the next, in an unbroken run.
And it's my pleasure now to introduce the first speaker, Ivy.
Good morning. My name is Ivy Blackman, and I'm the managing librarian at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
So joining you this morning from New York, and the material and I want to make sure I let you know at the top, I'm presenting the research largely of
Justine Provino. This object next to me was a bit of a mystery to me when Justine first contacted us here in our library.
Most of the information Justine was able to gather on this prospectus and how a copy of it entered
the Whitney's library Special Collections comes from Justine's interview with the publisher,
Kevin Begos Junior in March 2021.
And this material is variously described as a promotional prospectus piece or kit advertising to collectors.
The full Agrippa artist's book. The prospectus is a rare collectable and
Justine is aware of only one other surviving copy and it is in a private collection.
That goes to explain that this promotional perspective piece is an idea from Dennis Ashbaugh,
the artist who collaborated to create Agrippa with the writer William Gibson,
and with Begos. Ashbaugh and Begos work together on the making of this advertising art work,
which combines in miniature all of the elements for the deluxe edition of the book.
The honeycomb cardboard presentation box, and this floppy disk sealed in epoxy. Begos shared that the disk
for the promotional perspective piece is blank; William Gibson's poem for Agrippa is not encoded on it.
He also specifies that the sealant is specifically epoxy.
He described this piece as alluding to the content of the deluxe edition.
He explained that Ashbaugh made about 50 copies of the promotional prospectus pitch, or piece.
They sent it out to potential collectors and institutions to generate interest in the book project.
And this is how the Whitney received this copy. The catalogued-on date is February 27th, 1992, but I do not have,
unfortunately, specific information about when or how it arrived in our library.
Begos sent the promotional prospectus piece early in the life of the book project before copies of the book itself were available.
Justine found related press in the Agrippa archives at the Bodleian.
She shared a brief piece published in Locus Magazine in April 1992,
an anonymous book review mentioning a promotional Perspectives piece that Locus had received from the publisher.
And it pretty clearly describes the object that we have here at the Whitney.
It says 'The artefact we received from the publisher has a computer disk mounted in the centre of the newspaper-covered handmade preview piece',
and describes it as 'a rather mindboggling piece of advertising art', which I think pretty clearly sums it up for us.
And I also just want to show you the
statement that came with it, including a mounted image that is familiar to those familiar with the book,
although I believe that ours is in a different colour. And some text about what the object is.
So, thank you so much. And I'm going to toss it to our next presenter.
[Justine Provino] Yes. I don't know if everyone can hear me.
And also online, I hope? So, yes. Now we start with the first ...
I've got the first copy of the book. So this is the deluxe edition
copy that is at the Bodleian. And this is the presentation box for it.
And the presentation box is actually
a polymer fibreglass reproduction of the Kodak photo album that William Gibson was inspired by, when he wrote his poem about his father.
When you open the box, you can see that it is actually filled with corrugated cardboard,
and that has been layered with various paints and there is also a shroud.
Currently the book is on display next door in the Fox Talbot exhibition.
However, when the book is generally kept here and housed at the Bodleian,
it is always separated from the box because it was a preservation decision, that
the chemicals from the paint could actually off-gas onto the organic components of the book.
So this is the deluxe edition, Copy archive 1.
And as Ivy mentioned, I did interview Kevin in March 2021 he told me that they were supposed to be Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3,
And then an artist's proof copy and numbered copies, but all of that didn't happened which we will hear more and learn more
About it during the symposium, however, here you see Archive 1.
You just saw that this copy was signed by William Gibson and Kevin Begos.
And here now we go into the text block, and you see the title and facing the title page, there is an etching by Dennis Ashbaugh.
So, what is the text? Well the text is actually an excerpt from the DNA of the fruit fly,
and it is printed in two columns and 42 lines, which will be familiar to you all
as the format of the Gutenberg Bible.
In addition, as you can see in each of the eight designs of this copy,
there are actually etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh, these etchings are copper aquatint etchings and they are fixed in this copy and they come in various hues,
as you can see, green, grey, sepia, yellow,
and they are actually related to the DNA of the fruit fly as well because they are an artistic representation of the auto-radiograph pattern.
So the auto-radiograph is basically the DNA barcode pattern that we each have, a living organism inside us.
So that's what it is representing.
So now the final bit of this copy is this last opening, and you see a carved out cavity in the final last third of the textblock.
The whole textblock, the last 20 pages are all adhered together with adhesive, and that's it.
And it's empty. So something is missing here, that was actually never part of the copy.
It was a diskette, and Kevin Begos told me when he donated the book to the Bodleian he had actually no more copy of the diskette, the book had no diskette to put in it.
And so now I'll pass it over to the V&A, to Elizabeth, Catriona and Doug.
And they are showing a very different copy from the same edition, actually.
I'll just say good afternoon, everyone. My name is Catriona Gourley, and I'm looking forward to meeting lots of you later in Oxford.
But at the moment I'm here in the National Art Library at the V&A with my colleague Elizabeth James,
and we're going to tell you about our copy of Agrippa and our former colleague Douglas Dodds is going to tell you all about it.
Thanks, Catriona. Thanks, Elizabeth.
As Catriona says, I was a curator at the V&A for many years, and I'm actually partly responsible for acquiring Agrippa for the museum.
It was actually bought from the artists' book dealer, Tony Zwicker, in early 1995 for $2,060.
And we bought it because it was obviously a major item to add to the collection.
But I was also organising an exhibition at the time that was due to take place in the V&A's 20th century gallery.
The exhibition was called 'The Book and Beyond', and Agrippa was absolutely perfect for that because the exhibition
focussed on the relationship between artist books and electronic publishing,
and Agrippa basically embodied both of those things. Some years later I also exhibited it in a another show called Digital Pioneers,
which was basically about the early history of digital art. As you can see from the cover here,
The V&A's copy looks superficially at least quite like the Bodleian copy. It came in the same box made out of fibreglass or Kevlar,
a similar sort of shroud. But as you go through the book, you find that it's actually rather different in detail.
We actually store it in an acid free box and it's accessed by appointment only.
So it's been viewed fairly sparingly since it was acquired.
Elizabeth, perhaps you could open the book. Thank you.
So, if we just pause for a second on the front, the inside front cover, and then if you can zoom in there, if people can actually see it.
But the book is signed at the top by William Gibson only.
Not by Ashbaugh, certainly not by the publisher, Begos.
But down at the bottom corner,
you'll also see that it's also marked as an artist's proof, number four of ten copies.
Now, this seems to approximate to the deluxe edition, but I don't know of any other artist proofs in other public collections.
I haven't seen another one. Perhaps we could move on to look at the same opening.
That one again is very similar, I think, to the Bodleian copy we've just seen.
So perhaps you should move on again, a few pages, to the yellow and black one.
Elizabeth. That's it.
I think. Unlike the Bodleian copy, this one is actually over printed with toner ink, the kind of thing you get in a photocopier.
And it was designed to degrade as the book was used in practice,
it's degraded probably rather less than was expected.
I can't quite see on my screen, but maybe if you zoom in to the text, can you see any of the offsetting on that page?
A little. A little. So perhaps we should move on again through the book a bit further.
There's a page much further. Yeah.
So, some of the pages actually have images printed on the back rather than the front page, as in the other copies.
In this case, if you zoom in on that.
You see, it is actually toner ink that's meant to brush off the page, but it hasn't brushed off as much as it perhaps might have done.
So perhaps you could move on again, Elizabeth, until you get to the page with the TV set on the corner.
Keep going. It's a text block page.
Keep going. So you can see all these pages have over-printing on them.
And to some extent it's transferred across to the opposite page.
You keep going, ah gone ahead now.
Somewhere in there is a page with just text, but with a similar image over-printed on the page.
Rather than on the engraving. Yeah, don't worry.
I think people are getting the idea of it. Let's skip ahead to the exciting bit, the cutout in the
page. Keep going.
There we go. So this is the page that people are very familiar with - in the V&A copy, at least.
And this is the one that we displayed a couple of times,
as an opening in the couple of exhibitions I mentioned earlier, and that's possibly how it was meant to be viewed.
So suddenly you come to the actual floppy disk, which incidentally hasn't actually been played.
So we took a decision not to do that when we acquired the book.
So in theory at least, the text of William Gibson's poem is still on there. The subsequent pages of the book
though, in many copies are a solid block of text where the pages have been glued together.
In practice, though, in the V&A's copy, either the glue has failed a little or else it never really held very well.
If you turn the page again, Elizabeth.
You come to this page, which I'm not at all sure whether it was meant to be seen or whether it was meant to be part of the glued-together pages.
But essentially, if you lift the disk out of there Elizabeth, you get a better idea of the depth of it.
This is the kind of receptacle really where the disk was meant to go.
But rather surprisingly, it's got what looks like an abstract painting by Ashbaugh around it.
As I say, whether that was meant to be there or whether it was just the glue has failed, we can't really be sure now.
In any event, the rest of the book, the pages are fairly securely glued together still.
But there is some weakening, I think, of the glue which allows you just to get a peek in without opening the page completely.
So that's essentially our copy of it. It's actually changed quite a bit over the years.
I've looked at it several times and I've noticed quite a lot of shifts in it.
One is the obvious transfer of the images across.
Another is the actual book itself, the fabric of the book itself. If you close it, Elizabeth, it's actually now bowing somewhat at the edges.
It was certainly flat when we bought it, but possibly the glue or something has started to permeate into the covers.
So it's changed substantially, but perhaps not in the way that it was originally intended.
I think that's probably all we need to say. So I should now hand over to Gabriella.
Thanks very much. And thanks to Elizabeth and Catriona.
Thank you and good morning from Yale University in Connecticut.
My name is Gabriella. I'm actually a museum curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography,
but I'm also the manager of the Allan Chasanoff Collection here at the university.
And our deluxe copy of the book was a part of the Allan Chasanoff Book art collection.
Allan Chasanoff was a private collector, and he collected books mainly from the nineties,
mainly sculptural, books made out of books and sculptures made out of books.
And he gave us this book as a part of his collection in 2012.
In 2014, we actually had an exhibition when we exhibited this book and we exhibited it like this.
So I just wanted to show you how we showed it in the exhibition and this gave
it gave a little bit more of a perhaps a sculptural presence in the exhibition.
It looks a bit like a architecture, archaeological specimen.
Or something like that. So I'm just going to take it out of its case.
Allan bought this book from Kevin in 1995.
He was a friend of Kevin. And we also have here, when you open the book, an invite to the launch of the Agrippa book in 1992.
Our edition is 10 of 95 and it is signed by Gibson and
also Ashbaugh. We have this as a part of our collection.
So it's an accession object, we keep it instorage and it's viewable by appointment only.
And the visitors can't handle this, so we will handle it for them.
We haven't had a lot of people looking at it, so it's rarely accessed and we haven't seen a lot of changes in the book.
But as you can see, we don't have any fixed art in here, so they're all transferring, the loose pigments to the opposite pages.
And I'm trying to find this spread with a TV.
Here it is, that you tried to show. The last speaker tried to show.
And this is the loose DNA Dipstick page, which is one of the last pages in the book.
And here are diskettes. And actually Allan Chasanoff, the donor of the book, he actually had an agreement with Kevin
and I think also Dennis, to send the diskettes to the University of California.
He did this in 2008 to have it read on a computer from 1992.
And we actually have two diskettes in the book.
And this one was read and is therefore empty, presumably.
This one we haven't read.
And Allan said, I just did some research on this, and he just says in his files that he presumes it's empty, but we haven't read it.
And I don't think Allan did either. And when the diskette was read
it was also recorded to emulate the reading experience on the screen, which you now can see on YouTube.
And we also have chosen to have a hard copy of the poem in our curatorial file.
So that's our copy, and I will hand you over to the next speaker.
[Leah] I'm having trouble sharing my screen. It's saying host disabled participant screen sharing.
All right.
That seems to have worked. Right. Okay.
And thank you very much for having me on. Leah Johanson, I'm from the New York Public Library's Manuscripts Archives and Rare Books Division.
And we have a deluxe edition.
And I'll adjust the lighting here, it's a little glaring, but we also have one of these labels at the top right corner.
And compared to the other ones we've seen already today, ours is a lot less legible.
You can see that there are definitely letters and symbols under there, but it's not nearly as clear as some of the other ones we've seen.
and, when we take that off and you can see our copy is also in netting, but it's grey as compared to the Bodleian's red.
And it's also got the honeycomb with the glitter and paint on it.
Here's the copy itself. You can see the spine is really burnt and kind of cut up.
And when you open it -- give it a minute to focus.
Let's see. You can see that both Gibson and Ashbaugh have signed in the top right corner, and ours at the bottom is labelled number 12 of 95.
And this here. I'm not sure if you can see our call number, but it says 05, which means that we catalogued it,
in '05, it was definitely acquired by the library in the nineties.
And unfortunately, I don't have any more information than that.
Our current rare book curator joined here in 2001 and stated that it was already part of the collection when he arrived,
but I don't have any information as to who bought it and when and for how much.
There's been some urban legends from the 1990s staff members that images have appeared disappeared over the years,
but I haven't seen any of that myself. And if we go through here, you can see that we have the Anthonys Timing Plummet advertisement.
This one was faint to begin with, and it's transference hasn't been as pronounced.
You can see a bit of it here, the T, but you can see with a lot of ours, the transference from the etching side to the textblock is pretty severe.
I think that's likely because we do allow readers to come in and use it.
You do have to have an appointment, but we serve it to researchers in the reading room, as Justine can attest.
And as always, we require clean, dry hands.
We serve it on foam wedges, but we do allow readers to turn the pages themselves,
which has probably resulted in more transference than other copies have seen.
But because we do allow research researchers to come in and interact with the book,
a lot of the research that has been done typically uses our copy as opposed to other institutional copies.
And you can see this page used to be glued down and it has become completely unglued.
The rest of the textblock, has remained glued together.
And you can see the recess where the floppy disk is.
Our floppy disk is in this plastic container that's cut open at the top.
We did not do that. It arrived at NYPL like that.
And NYPL has never played this diskette, so ostensibly it should still have the poem on it. That might be everything to cover on our copy.
So I will hand it off to Gillian at the Center for the Book. [Gillian] Hi everybody
Thank you so much for having me. My name is Gillian and I am librarian at Centre for the Arts and I am also calling in from New York.
I am presenting three copies of a group of Agrippa today. These three copies,
we do not have information on exactly how they entered our collections, but
We have a pretty strong idea that they remained in our collections after we exhibited,
we had an exhibition on Agrippa in 1993 after it was published.
This exhibition came about because Center for Book Arts founder Richard Minsky actually told me yesterday that he got in touch with Kevin Begos Jr,
who met Richard while taking classes at Center for Book Arts.
And that's how the exhibition came about, and that's probably how these three copies entered our collections.
All three copies are signed just by William Gibson and are numbered, and none of them have the translucent case,
honeycomb or netting. So they are just the book itself and we keep them in acid-free boxes.
So the first of the three copies that I'll show you is number 28 of 95.
This is the only copy that has the title on the cover.
As you can see, the cover is a lot less distressed than other copies that we've seen today with
most of any discolouration from being burnt is really just around the title.
It is signed by the artist and numbered and the inside looks much like the copies that you've seen today.
There are not so many, if any at all,
images over printed onto the etchings or transferred onto the pages.
And at the very end, there is a hollow where a diskette might go, but our copy has never had a floppy disk.
Several of the pages, as in previous copies that we've seen today that are in this block of hollowed out pages, several are lifting up.
And like the V&A copy, I don't know if that is because they were never glued down or if it's because the glue aged and dried out.
As with the NYPL copy, researchers can handle and turn the pages of these books by appointment.
This is our second copy. It is number 33 of 95, also signed by William Gibson.
There is no title on the cover. This is sort of the plainest of our three copies at the back.
There is no hollow, just a bunch of blank pages.
There's one piece of distressing on the cover. And
no burning or any distressing on the spine.
The third copy and final copy in our collections is number 35 of 95.
It's a little, tiny, tiny, bit more distressed on the cover.
But again, there's no title and it's basically plain white, nothing on the back.
And it looks much like our second copy.
With the additional unusual feature of a single
folded sheet printed with the same content as the printed pages, on a different longer fibre paper with an edge that extends outside of
the text block that was not bound into the text block that is just in the pages. And at the end of this copy,
like our second copy, no
hollow, just blank pages.
Those are the Center for Book Arts copies.
Thank you. And I will pass it back to Justine.
So that was all of the surviving existing copies in the deluxe edition, that are currently in the public collections,
as you saw, they are all numbered out of 95.
How many copies were made? That remains a secret.
And when I interviewed Kevin, he told me that this is a secret that he wished to keep to himself.
So we don't know.
But I have identified ten of these deluxe edition copies.
Seven of them we saw today, three are in private collections, one of them will be shown in the next panel.
So now we move to the small edition. And again, there were supposed to be 350 of the small edition copies.
That didn't happen. And I have only identified four of them, and the four of them will be shown between between this panel
and then after with the other panel with the Agrippa scholars
So without further a do. So actually, now, we actually now we are showing with the visualiser, this is the box from the small edition copy.
And from the outside, it looks more what we expect to see.
Usually in library. Like an archival box, a clamshell box, cloth covered.
But again, when we open it,
then it's slightly different and it is still with this corrugated honeycomb pattern and that is again layered with paint.
And on the other side you see that the box is lined with actually newspapers and Kevin,
When I interviewed him, told me that he was the one who actually lined this box with this newspaper,
they all come from the same batch and they are from the twenties and the thirties and similarly to
the preservation decision that was made here at the Bodleian with the deluxe edition copy box and
book are housed separately for kind of obvious reasons that there are chemicals component that come
with the paint but also acidic components that are part of the woodpulp that is used to make newspapers.
So what is known as lignin and so this lignin inside
it results, as you might be aware, when you leaf through newspapers and then you, you know,
you don't touch it for a long time in a yellow discolouration of the newspaper.
So that's why box and book are housed separately here at the Bodleian.
And so now we turn to the book.
And again, when I interviewed Kevin, he told me that the small edition initially was supposed to be a smaller size replica of the deluxe edition.
So when you look at the small edition from the outside, it looks quite similar, maybe
a little bit less worn out and not as much frayed and burned at the edges, but still with the embossed title.
So that looks similar, but at least for this copy then that is different.
So if we open it first, yes, you will see that this one is signed by William Gibson and Kevin Begos Jr and then it is numbered.
So number 77 of 350.
And so at the time these copies you could buy them for $450.
But then now if we move to the title page you will see that it is slightly different.
And you can remember that, you know, all the title pages in the deluxe edition copies,
they are faced by an etching by Ashbaugh and you here you have a small size reproduction.
so a photocopy, of an etching by Ashbaugh,
with an overprint piece, a diagram of how to mount a pistol on it.
And this is all fixed, and nothing is smudging or offsetting.
So it's all fixed, and term then of the text printed.
Yes, it is again, the DNA of the fruitfly, with the title page.
But again, different. It is only one column and 20 lines.
So, no Guttenberg Bible reference here, then now if we leaf through the text block, you'll see that it is only
text and there are no more etching by Ashbaugh.
Or reproduction of his etchings and the overprint with it, and for the copy at the Bodleian, that is basically it.
Because as we keep leafing through it, you'll see that we reach completely the other side of the text block.
There is no end leaf, the paste down is again a printed text, and then there is no carved out cavity and there is certainly no diskette.
So that's for the small edition copy at the Bodleian.
But you would see with our final panellist, Susan Stueur at Kalamazoo, that it is a very different copy that they have,
even though it is from the same edition. So over to you Susan.
Good morning. I am the librarian at Special Collections in Rare Books in Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
And we have a copy of the small edition.
As you can see, our box does not include the newsprint at all, but we have the normal cloth here and the honeycomb in the lining in the box.
I am not sure when our copy was purchased. It was here when I came in 2006.
It was catalogued in 2004 and presumably purchased by the previous curator, who did have an interest in artists books and purchased a lot,
began our collection in that area. Our copy has on the title quite a bit of sort of a second shadow of the print on the title,
which I didn't I can't couldn't see in any of the other copies.
And it's signed by William Gibson 152 of 350 copies.
The I believe Kevin Begos told Justine that this was the this edition.
This copy represents what the small edition was supposed to look like.
As we go through, we can see that.
There's a few fly leaves, the paper, there's a lot of transfer.
And I believe the text is different on this page than on the other small edition copy.
And there's quite a bit of transfer, but the rest of the book is much cleaner.
And I would note that the images in this one are glued in and on a separate kind of paper, then the wrap, then the text, the rest of the text.
As we leaf through. The pages at the front are fairly clean and when you get to the back,
there's a great deal more singeing and there's a lot of singeing on the image pages.
You can see that our binding has begun to separate.
You can clearly see the stitching between the gatherings.
And. Ours is available to anyone who comes to our library.
We're a public institution that has a mission to share everything we own with the people of Michigan.
Here you can see more clearly where the separation is occurring. And so anyone who comes in and wants to see it can see it.
We still have not had a lot of people look at it. Aside from a few visitors and remote because of our location, people usually ask us for photographs.
So it's been photographed for.
Various researchers. We do have a number of images in our copy and perhaps.
We do have our diskette, our cataloguing notes
That is unencrypted. So I assume that it has been opened up.
The diskette itself is painted and I don't know how that would affect the actual access to it.
And we have a little bit of loosening of pages, but not to the extent that some of the other copies do.
And that's our addition. Thank you.