Maker

DIY-brary

Rick and Megan Prelinger couldn’t find a library with what they wanted, so they made their own. By R.U. Sirius

It’s an overcast Monday afternoon as I arrive at and — most of all — their obsessions. In addition to 8th and Folsom in San Francisco’s seedy, bohe- its physical presence in San Francisco, it has an on-mian SOMA district. I find 301 8th Street and then line presence of more than 3,000 scanned volumes buzz Room 215. A voice says hello. I tell him who at the Internet Archive (archive.org).

I am and he buzzes me in. I take an elevator to the Rick is also the founder of the Prelinger Archives, second floor, walk past several closed offices, and a collection of about 200,000 discrete items, enter a small room packed to the rafters with four including 60,000 advertising, educational, indus-rows of shelves filled with books stacked 15 feet trial, and amateur films. Rick founded the archives high. This is not your typical 21st-century urbane, in 1982, and the Library of Congress acquired it in haute-culture library. 2002. A subset of the archives is freely download-

The Prelinger Library (prelingerlibrary.org) is able and reusable at the Internet Archive. the brainchild of Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick Rick and Megan met in 1998 over a mutual inter-Prelinger. Founded in 2004, it’s a DIY, appropriation- est in the American landscape (Rick was looking friendly, intuitive, and highly personalized context for into restarting Landscape magazine). They soon organizing and sharing this couple’s books, periodi- discovered that they shared, in Megan’s words, cals, printed ephemera (like obscure government “a remarkably similar set of cultural reference documents from the Department of Indian Affairs), points and values, such as … punk rock and the

Photography by Robyn Twomey

54 Make: Volume 16

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