Publisher’s description:

There is a crisis in the archives. Contemporary protocols for archiving and accessing increasingly vast amounts of materials present unprecedented possibilities and problems for the production, classification, and use of knowledge. Surveying the jagged edge between memory and forgetting, revealing the force and scope of some of memory's losses—its technical drop-outs, its lacunae, burials, omissions, eclipses, and denials—Lost in the Archives explores the thesis that memory is productively read from its failures and absences, in the not-yet or impossible archives, in archive fevers and dementias, in all the places archives cannot or have not looked. Like a purloined letter, the shelved and forgotten book wields its most virulent power precisely in being unread. Unread, if not indeed illegible, what is lost in the archive may prove to exert the most shocking force. Edited and with an introduction by Rebecca Comay. Series Editor John Knechtel. Art Director Gilbert Li. This 700-page collection includes texts and images by over 70 artists and writers, including Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Friedrich Kittler, Sharon Lockhart, Irit Rogoff, Atom Egoyan, Gustave Flaubert, Boris Groys, Candida Höfer, Rem Koolhaas, Sol Lewitt, Bruce Mau, Jeff Wall, Michael Newman, Julija Šukys, Uriel Orlow, Beatriz Hausner, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska, and many others.

Lost in the Archives was published as the companion volume to Canada's official entry—an exhibition titled NEXT MEMORY CITY—in the 8th International Venice Biennale for Architecture (2002).

Reviews: Bob Horton, The American Archivist 67, no. 2 (2004), 296–99.