“Book Zero” through the Years

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the first two editions of Peter Carroll’s Liber Null (1978, 1981). Along with Ray Sherwin’s The Book of Results (1979, 1980, 1981), they shape the earliest corpus of chaos magic literature. Often overlooked due to their rarity and the availability of the mainstream 1987 edition of Liber Null, these two, the so-called white and red editions, offer a peak into the early years of the chaos magic current and the formation of Carroll’s ideas. The white edition in particular contains concepts and terminology that are either nonexistent or significantly altered in the later editions. The paper opens with a history of these texts, followed by some comments on their materiality. The main focus, however, is to closely analyse the 1978 edition and to consider the significance of textual variations in later editions.