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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