To conceive Mémoires Hoff dusted a copy of Douglas Huebler’s Secrets: Variable Piece 4 (1977), revealing fingerprints of the book’s prior readers. Secrets was an index of secrets collected by Huebler during the exhibition Software, held at the Jewish Museum, New York, from September 16–November 8, 1970. “Nearly 1,800 ‘secrets’ were submitted for exchange and have been transcribed exactly as written except that surnames have been edited: all are printed in this book and join with this statement as final form of this piece.”—from the book’s back cover. The date of publication is often stated as 1973. However, that date references when work was conceived, not the date of the book’s publication, which was in 1977.