Visit to the Prelinger Library

When Sarah and I stopped by the Prelinger Library on Wednesday evening (the only day they're open til 8pm), I realized that I hadn't been there in almost a year. I read about the place in article in Harper's years ago, and but had forgotten that it was in San Francisco by the time I moved here last fall. It's such a wonderful place but the logistical problem of being able to stop in on the one or two days each week they're open to the public always keep it feeling unfamiliar and strange to me. The layout of the space is somewhat burdened by the sheer amount of material they have (obviously not the worst problem a browsing-oriented, ephemera-heavy library could have) and the giant double-sided shelves used to house the books and other 'paper-based objects' are narrowly arranged and dimly lit. It's hard to see everything on display, even the stuff that's at eye-level, which can be frustrating is you are looking for something specific. But really, the Prelinger is not really the kind of place you should visit if you're only set on finding a certain thing. This place always gives you something other than what you're looking for when you decide to go there.

On this visit I started in the water section because it's currently closest to the entrance, where there were titles about cities that have built dams and their effects on the landscape, reference documents from meetings held long ago about regional water problems in California that are probably still problems now, something next to that with lines and lines of tiny text printed on tissue-y paper (a mid-western conference or symposium on this that or the other). Sarah was asking Megan (Prelinger, who along with her husband Rick Prelinger from the Internet Archive, runs the space) if they had any books on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (a.k.a. 1915 World's Fair in SF), so I moved down another aisle at random, squeezed past an over-sized rolling metal ladder that filled 4/5ths of the passing space, and ended up in a section on media and its role in how we interact with the world. A lot of these books seemed outdated already, one book I opened had a publishing date of 2002 and looked like something a seminar at New College would have used when I was there. I found the book I ended up spending the most time with while browsing the media section. It was an exhibition catalog from a 1998 b/w photography show at a major university museum (can't remember where now, nyu maybe?) on the advent of crime photography and its affect on how the press began to mediate public understandings of crime and especially criminals through what they chose to publish. Yep, I looked at that for, like, 30 minutes. I love this place.

I didn't take this photo, but this is what it looks like in there: