Sunday 11 August 2013

ordnance survey

Greg Miller, writing for WIRED! Magazine, goes on a fun adventure down the rabbit hole to browse through the unusual stacks of a place called the Prelinger Library hidden in San Francisco. The suite of rooms that make up the archive is a repository of some 75,000 vintage maps and other hiatoric ephemera that map out quite specific and pointed aspects of their subjects and that most collections do not preserve. Space comes at a premium for all these weird and wonderful examples, but the librarians operate under the principle it only takes one of them to acquire a document but the consent of two to get rid of it. This looks like a place to discover for one's self too.