On the one hand, then, is a book — importantly, a book written forty years before the production of the first electronic digital computer — that has retroactively come to signal the beginning of the digital revolution and the emergence of postmodern hypertext theory;^{4 On Mallarmé's Un coup de dés as the father of the "typographical revolution", see Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 253n26. On Mallarmé's Un coup de dés as a bellwether for digital media, see Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 210-211; see also Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959-1995 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007): 11; Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001): 153.} on the other is a digital storage model that projects both an imagined past and a future promise as-yet unfulfilled by our current media ecology. Although neither project was realized, both Mallarmé's Le Livre and Rabinow's doughnut-shaped disk drive mark speculative moments in the history of reading and writing — ruptures between our pre-digital past, "the book," and our now always/already digital present, theorized as the "book-to-come." As such, they help us map the history of literacy and inscription from the epistemic stance of our rapidly-changing digital present. For who "read" these computational devices? Who "wrote" on and in and to them? And how do these never-realized Books not only store and retrieve information — the persistent "container" theory of media — but act as language machines^{5On the notion of "language machines," see the introduction to Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. by Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999): 94; Steve Caffrey and bpNichol, Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, The Collected Research Reports of The Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992): 60.}, generating new knowledge?