This San Francisco Library Collects Print Materials You Were Never Meant to See

In an era of digital media, it’s rare to come across a treasure trove of print materials. But that’s precisely San Francisco’s Prelinger Library’s purpose: to collect, categorize and create a longer shelf life for “ephemera” — things like maps, brochures, advertisements and catalogs — that were never meant to keep a reader’s attention for too long.

“The thing about ephemera is that the short-term document is often more revealing. It’s like a provisional idea; it’s a risk,” says Rick Prelinger, one of the library’s founders, who co-founded the space 20 years ago with his wife, Megan. They gave the collection their last name, and keep it going with a mix of small donations, grants, and their own earned income.

The premise of the collection is simple: flyers and other materials capture a moment when people are speaking freely because they don’t think what they say is going to last. Social media is a great comparison; it, too, is a platform for thoughts and opinions created in the moment, for the moment, but it can have a lasting impact. So, what’s the “vintage” version of Instagram Stories? Ephemera.

Picture a library. This library is … probably not that. It’s not the norm.

First of all, the Prelinger Library’s location is a bit unconventional. It’s above a carpet store, in a former industrial laundromat, and across from a pole dancing studio.

“It was cheaper than storage” for their ever-expanding collection, Rick says.

The second way Prelinger strays from the typical public library is the look and feel of the collection area. When you enter the library, there’s a giant neon sign that’s the closest thing the Prelingers have to a mission statement. It reads, “Free speech, fear free.” Meaning: You’re safe to explore here. … and there is a lot to explore.

“We sometimes joke that this library is 98% bad ideas,” Rick quips.

Floor-to-ceiling ephemera

The room feels like a big storage space — cement floors, 12-foot-high ceilings, and almost no windows. You can’t check books out, but you can stay and flip through them (with a cup of tea that Rick and Megan offer). When I was there, another visitor brought in her homemade hazelnut brittle to share.

“The clichés about [the] quiet, dust, [and] librarians saying ‘shush,’ – those are all years out of the window,” Rick says.

It’s a somewhat subversive community of folks who frequent the library, but it is a notable one. Jenny Odell, who writes about the concept of time, has used the stacks for inspiration. So has Gary Kamiya, author of the Cool Grey City of Love, as well as John King, the Chronicle’s architecture expert, science writer Annalee Newitz, and artist/activist Xiowai Wang. Creativity tends to strike when visitors walk through the stacks; the library has informed all of their work.

Radical record-keeping

One of my favorite pieces at the Prelinger is a bit “meta.” It’s called “Revolting Librarians,” and it’s a handbook for something called “radical librarianship.”

Megan reads from the copyright page: “Instead of a copyright notice, it says ‘Do copy. Do something. No rights reserved, no wrongs preserved.’”

Rick and Megan are exactly this type of “revolting librarian.” They’re soft-spoken with punk pasts, and their library is founded on the idea of open-source information, or freedom to use the printed word as one chooses.

If you’re someone interested in film — Rick has also been gathering non-print bits of ephemera for decades, too. Things like: video clips of 1950s housewives making their husbands do the housework, early television news reports, and strident, free-enterprise propaganda films from the 1930s.

For over a decade, Rick has presented a film-length version of these kinds of clips at a screening called Lost Landscapes.

Themes for the screenings offer “a picture of the world that’s a lot more actionable — it’s about change, it’s about influence, it’s about intention,” Rick says.

Without the Prelingers’ intention, none of this would be here.

Combining collections, creating history

Rick and Megan were pen pals before they became partners in business and in life. They began living together here in California in the 90s. And the rest is, well … history.

“Shortly after we met, we pooled our vinyl, and it seemed natural that from then on, we should pool our text collections,” Rick says.

They had much more than they could store in their apartment. So, they found this space and decided to open it to the public in 2004.

Megan remembers, “We had a week-long barn raising, [and] invited everyone we knew. We treated it as a weeklong shelving party, and the collection had all these hands on it and all these minds touching it.”

“People would be shelving on the higher shelves, and everything would slow down because they started to read,” Rick says.

Shelving digital ‘discards’

When the world started to get a lot more digital in the 1990s, libraries started to clear out their catalogs. An off-the-radar network of like-minded librarians brought the “discards” to Rick and Megan’s attention. Their loss was the Prelingers’ gain. Megan created a unique organizational system to store all this material, which is very different from the dusty old Dewey Decimal system, which has been criticized for marginalizing women and people of color (among other issues).

Megan organized the stacks so that people slow down, browse, and — hopefully — bump into each other to share ideas along the way. There’s a whole area dedicated to transportation, with transit scrapbooks made from newspaper clippings. Eventually, the collection’s organization evolves into more abstract ideas like human rights. … and finally, at the very end of the stacks: outer space.

A San Francisco space

“We could have built this library [in] a lot of places,” Rick says, “but here [in San Francisco], there’s a real sense that the past and the future are intertwined.”

The Prelingers say that their library channels the spirit of discovery and reinvention that the Bay Area stands for.

Both the library and the city, Megan says, are built to surprise you. And every now and then, you stumble across something special.