Settling on a title for Megan Shaw Prelinger was tough. “Renegade librarian,” “cultural historian,” “collector of the uncommon,” and “arrangement schema superstar” were but a few of the ideas that hopped in and out of my brain while we spoke inside her namesake library, San Francisco’s Prelinger Library. Specializing in bygone artifacts and ephemera and organized by a system Megan devised herself, the library is an extraordinary place.
But, when I asked Megan what she’d consider the most appropriate title for herself, “library builder,” was her humble and simple suggestion. “It can kind of encompass all of that,” she says. “Collection building, community building, and transforming the process of research into something that’s like an institution but isn’t.”