One of the newest acquisitions in Megan Prelinger’s library is a prosthetic leg. It dates to World War I, handcrafted of oak and hammered silver.
Donated in 2025 by Tina Hittenberger, heir to a prosthetics company her family once operated on Market Street, the well-worn leg now lives within the Prelinger Library’s strange and wide-ranging collection — alongside books, art, and historical records (including historical BART materials known as “BARTifacts”) that do not always fit neatly into the categories of a conventional library.
Since the library’s founding in 2004, the collection, stewarded by Prelinger, her husband and an evolving band of volunteers, has grown to an estimated 50,000 items that other institutions may have discarded or failed to understand. Beyond the library, the couple have gained a following for “Lost Landscapes of San Francisco,” a film project compiling historic Bay Area footage from their archives. Many of the library’s materials are stored on 10-foot-high steel shelves spanning floor to ceiling across the majority of the space, accessed by 12-step rolling ladders.
There are a few shelves scattered between, holding thick gray boxes of clippings from San Francisco newspapers, meticulously organized according to each city neighborhood by local archivist Norm Therkelson. A quick browse of the SoMa newspaper collection from the 1990s reveals a series of articles documenting the clash between the neighborhood’s residential building boom and nightclub scene. (“SOMA WARS,” one headline blares.)
Prelinger is careful not to describe the space as a homage to a bygone era. “It’s a museum of possibility that exists really to support the future,” she says. “This is not a nostalgia project.”
Long before Prelinger, now 58 years old, landed in San Francisco as a full-time historical archivist, she was a 17-year-old trying to support herself. She lived lean in San Francisco while working temp jobs.
“It was tough,” she recalls.
She had one obvious credential at the time: She could type fast, up to 80 words per minute. That was enough to get her steady work, which led her to the cellular telephone industry, where her employer learned she could do much more.
Prelinger edited documents, proofread engineering materials, assembled newsletters and took on odd travel assignments that kept her employed and able to pay her own way through college.
At Reed College, Prelinger studied anthropology, linguistics, Mandarin and radio science. In the spring of 1989, while studying in China, she found herself amid the social unrest that led to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing. She watched the protests build, with hunger strikes and the construction of the Goddess of Democracy statue. She fled the city by train shortly before troops and tanks opened fire on protesters on June 3.
“I left a note for my friends on a bulletin board in the American Embassy to tell them where I’d gone. Back then, you could only call people on the phone at great expense,” Pelinger said. “It wasn’t so easy to connect with others from afar.”
She followed the news from China on a shortwave radio on her train ride home.
At Reed, Prelinger completed a thesis on Tiananmen Square. But by the time she finished college, she was burned out on formal schooling and the slog of working to support her studies.
“I was never going to not have an active intellectual life,” she said. The question was whether she could shape such a life outside of academic halls.
She searched for an answer in the Bay Area. After college, she moved to Berkeley, where she joined a writing and research collective, Bad Subjects, that spun out into a zine. She began collecting books as she wrote about literature for the zine, and on an early version of the Internet called Gopherspace.
Some of those articles reached out into the ether and touched Rick Prelinger, her now-husband, all the way in New York. They met in person in San Francisco as independent scholars interested in histories that lived outside official channels.
“Eighteen months later, we were hitched,” Prelinger said. “I had never had a support system before, a battery-pack. That changed everything for me.”
Around the turn of the millennium, as libraries consolidated holdings and shed periodicals, government documents and other printed matter in favor of more digitized holdings, the Prelingers’ personal collection expanded rapidly. Then the dot-com crash softened warehouse rents in SoMa.
They leased the Eighth and Folsom space in late 2003, and after a weeklong shelving “barn raising” by friends and volunteers, opened the library to visitors in June 2004.
The room’s architecture has become part of its romance: the sense that anyone could wander into an unexpected subject and come out with a different understanding of the world. But for disabled visitors, browsing the stacks could be difficult or impossible to navigate.
In 2017, programmer and librarian Devin Smith created Stacks Explorer, a remote-access browsing environment that allows disabled and remote researchers to move visually through the shelves online. After a major 2020 reorganization, Smith rephotographed every shelf in high resolution and rebuilt the interface. The new version includes a “stars” button, setting a twinkling sky behind the stacks.
Prelinger says she sees the library as building on SoMa’s overlapping legacies of warehouse labor, printing presses and alternative media. Two decades since its opening, she said she wants the library to continue to serve as a reminder that the world can be reimagined.
She points, for example, to the library’s archives of New Deal-era government publications — records of a very different time in democratic government, she said, when housing, infrastructure, art and social services were built out at national scale.
“It’s getting hard to provide resources for the future,” she says. “We’re here to give people evidence-based hope.”
