Rogue archivists and forgotten histories

This piece was featured first on Nov 20 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

Let me tell you about the Prelinger Library. To get there, you head down to the leather district in Soma in San Francisco, hit a buzzer on a nondescript building, and take the old freight elevator to the second floor. You walk down the hallway, shoes on hardwood, and then make a left through double doors.

Inside, you find magic. It’s a repository of rare books, ephemera collections, and two of the smartest observers of the Bay Area, Rick and Megan Prelinger. The library is a manifestation of their quirkiness and brilliance. There is nowhere like it. They know what the standard offerings on a topic are and they are committed to delivering surprise.

It’s the library as an art form itself. And I’m not the only one who loves the Prelinger Library. A TikToker’s visit to the library went viral over the summer, and the space now has a whole new generation of visitors.

There are different ways to do history. I am often looking for the texture of regular life. What would it have been to walk around San Francisco in 1938 or 1978? How did people talk? What did their shoes look like? How did they answer the telephone? What would they have watched on TV on a Thursday night?

Academic historians are often less interested in these kinds of details. But rogue archivists like Rick and Megan revel in such detailed knowledge of our city and our world. For example, they have a complete run of TV Guide, so if you really want to know what was on ABC on a particular day in 1984, there is a way for you to know.

I first visited the Prelinger Library 15 years ago, when I was working on a book about the history of renewable energy. They have wonderful collections on the past technological dreams of our society, in energy and beyond. Megan wrote a book using their collections called Another Science Fiction, which uses the advertisements in corporate trade journals to describe the dreams of mid-century space travel.

The Prelingers, of course, also have a massive archive of industrial films and home movies, which Rick produces into a massive performance he calls Lost Landscapes. Both shows of the latest edition are sold out, but you can see last year’s here.

My last visit to the Library was on Sunday with the St. Mary’s MFA program, courtesy of Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who is on the faculty there. We loosed the students upon the collections with the instruction to look for the unexpected. It is one of the joys of my life to bring people to the library and watch them find books and objects they never could have imagined.

As the first drafts of history are revised, more and more texture gets erased. Particular narratives come to dominate about what the past actually was like. And more than anything else, the Prelinger Library is a testament to the fullness of history, the realness of the humans who lived back then, and the possibilities that might just lurk in the less-traveled reaches of our cultural memory.

Go visit! Check the hours and head over on some Tuesday, Wednesday, or Sunday.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum

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