In the summer of 1992, readers of the magazine Details could read the following book review about an upcoming artist’s book:

‘Agrippa’s temporal dislocation will likewise multiply: if Macintoshes aren’t around in thirty years, some collectors will find themselves the owners of a rare, expensive, unreadable book.’

— Gavin Edwards, ‘Cyber Lit’, Details (June 1992, p.134, Bodleian Library MS. 7981, fol. 3).

Over 30 years after the launch of Agrippa, a self-destructive collaborative book project by the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, the writer William Gibson and the artist Dennis Ashbaugh, join us over two consecutive afternoons to explore the fate of Agrippa’s copies in library collections, the place of artists’ books in book studies, and the intersection of analogue and digital in the field of material texts.

This symposium will be held in conjunction with the annual DF McKenzie Lecture, to be delivered by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. It is presented by the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book and the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts.