For 21 years, the Prelinger Library has operated out of a rectangular room on the second floor of a nondescript SoMa building at 301 8th St. Over that time, the singular repository of printed and visual material has become an indispensable resource for artists, historians, writers, and weirdos in the know.
Overseen by Megan and Rick Prelinger, the repository is filled to the brim with ephemera and snippets of 19th and 20th century history from the Bay Area and far beyond. Literally: One of the many categories you can browse is dedicated to outer space. You will find no Dewey Decimal System here. Instead, the Prelinger Library map gives off an air of free-associative madness tracing an intellectual path from, say, the geography of San Francisco to concepts like “extraction” and “un-American activities.”
As you follow this map, you may also hear a faint tone in the air, sounding not unlike the reverberation of a far-off big rig: That would be a sound installation from artist Thom Blum, designed to stir the senses as you meander through the stacks.
Like everything else about the library, its soundscape and layout are idiosyncratic and deeply considered by Megan and Rick. The duo has committed their careers to hunting and preserving ephemera, or things that are designed for temporary use — think ticket stubs, flyers, magazines, home movies, personal documents, and all manner of detritus that speak to the spontaneity and contradictions of life. In addition to the library in SoMa, they run the Prelinger Archives, which is based in a Richmond warehouse and focuses on digitizing rare films and making them freely accessible on the internet.
Last week, I met Megan, 57, and Rick, 72, in the Sunset to chat in person. In lieu of drinks or coffee, the pair suggested we roam the Botanical Garden at Golden Gate Park. We settled onto a wooden bench in the shade to reflect on their life in the city, and whether all their scavenged materials prove that the true golden days of San Francisco are behind us. (They couldn’t disagree more.)
“The history of this city made us want to be a part of it,” Rick said. “The past is kind of frozen here, with the architecture and all the beautiful old stuff that’s been preserved, but there was also a sense that SF was ahead of the rest of the country. But we are still a leader and a vanguard in so many ways.”
Rick grew up on the East Coast but headed west to attend UC Berkeley, a school he dropped in and out of as he embedded himself in the Bay Area punk scene. For a time he lived in an apartment on Guy Place, an alley just off First Street in SoMA where he had a view of the iconic Union Oil Company Building with its lit-up neon 76 sign. “Now it’s that weird building that looks like an electric heater,” he shrugged, referring to the condo high-rise One Rincon Hill.
As he bounced back east, setting up the Prelinger Archives in 1982 while working in New York, Megan was finding her way from Oregon to San Francisco.
She roomed in a Tenderloin flophouse, worked two jobs and saved money to attend Reed College in Portland. “In two weeks, I could earn more money in SF than in six months in Oregon,” Megan recalled.
As the child of hippies, Megan saw the movement’s backslide from revolution to a kind of complacency, marked in part by “older, middle- and working-class white people escaping into a lot of pot and the Grateful Dead as a new future.”
San Francisco, she felt, was “more multivalent, more inclusive, more action-oriented, rather than retreat-oriented.”
Eventually settling in the Richmond, Megan pursued a writing career, at one point penning a piece on landscapes and class for the Berkeley digital and print journal Bad Subjects, co-founded by Annalee Newitz. A reader in New York was impressed. That would be Rick.
In a serendipitous turn, Rick had been seeking writers to revive a cultural magazine called Landscape and sent an effusive letter to Megan. That turned into many more letters, then phone calls, then a flight from NYC to SF.
She still remembers their first night out: “It was June 2. We had drinks at Tosca.”
They married the following year, eloping in Vegas and later hosting a party at the Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park. In 2004, the couple decided to expand Rick’s archival work to include all manner of ephemera beyond film. The Prelinger Library was born.
“Megan and I were on the same page. She was a deep contrarian. Not the kind of person to simply say, ‘Wow, that’s a beautiful old diner.’ We wanted to understand how an artifact from the past can de-familiarize this crazy world around us,” Rick told me. “Ephemera is a fun way to ask really hard questions about our lives.”
They were equally enthralled by the power of the internet to open access to culture and history, and the Prelingers’ film collection became the first significant body of work for the Creative Commons movement.
“The long-running presence of a ‘free culture’ movement here was something important to me even before I met Rick,” Megan said. “It was a criticism of [the fact] that more culture is made than can be meaningfully exchanged for monetary value. It was an environment where projects like Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the ‘copy-left’ movement were born, and that is important to our sense of place.”
These radical efforts stood in contrast to parts of the built environment in San Francisco. As Rick puts it, tech capital had already “colonized public space” around the city, in part transforming Market Street from a corridor of small businesses to an anodyne district full of inscrutable glass walls along the sidewalk occasionally separated by corporate plazas patrolled by security guards.
There is an elegant irony in the fact the Prelinger Library lives not far from that corporate corridor yet operates so defiantly outside of it, standing as a haven for curious people in need of inspiration, be it a physicist or a pottery maker. The flight of tech companies after the burst of the dot-com bubble created space for a coterie of artists and idiosyncratic creatives, the Prelingers observed. In fact, it’s how they afforded to lease the space for the library.
Despite amassing so much material over the years, everything is still curated and packed into a 1,500-square-foot room.
The library closed for a time in 2020 during the onset of the pandemic, but to Megan and Rick’s surprise, donations from the public doubled that year, creating a rainy day fund that did not exist prior. More recently, they’ve experienced a major and unexpected swell of visitors, many of them Gen Z people of color, drawn by a viral TikTok video by art scenemaker Ash Herr. More than 500 new visitors have shown up in the last three months, many staying for hours at a time, lost in thought between steel bookcases.
“It’s what we’ve always wanted, to bridge divides between past and present,” Rick said. “It’s an alternative mode of distributing culture. It is so easy to give away a document or a scan. Why should it be so difficult to give away other goods and services that currently carry a price tag? That’s one of the lessons of this library.”
One of the Prelingers’ most popular projects is an annual screening of old, unseen snippets of San Francisco films and home movies called Lost Landscapes. Given that so much of their work is about preserving the past, I wondered how they feel about the city in 2025. Is this still the place the Prelingers have celebrated for decades, or has a newer population rendered it unrecognizable?
“People in San Francisco have been talking about cultural and social invasions forever,” Rick told me. “And we have to be really careful when we talk about invasions and new people coming in to change things. We want to save the good things that we have, but this is a port city. It's about constant interchange from people across the seas and through the air.”
The city sits on a tectonic plate, Megan added. Nothing is for sure but change. It shapes the society around us. Even the rock underneath us is called mélange.
“The nature of the rock is that it has inclusions from every process that forms its mashup. And we’re in one of the largest estuaries in North America,” Megan said. “Exchange and flow are built into the architecture of the place itself.”
