Megan Prelinger

Prelinger is a fifth-generation Oregonian, born in Yamhill County and raised in Eugene. After graduating Reed College, she embarked on a set of solo road trips through the interior western United States, visiting "landscapes", which she defines as places, not necessarily famous in the conventional sense, that have a human resonance. Working independently, she pursued an academic interest in "ephemeral literature", looking for sources among the discarded material from libraries and the shelves of used book stores and considering what this body of work could reveal about American history. Rick Prelinger, whose Prelinger Archives pursued similar goals as related to film, read two of her articles in the webzine/magazine Bad Subjects. They married in 1999. The Prelinger Library was launched in 2004 as the merging of their print collections and now contains more than 40,000 publications once thought to be of mere temporary interest: magazines, pamphlets, brochures and similar items that, said Megan, "contain micro-narratives, little stories that don't always make it into books." In 2010, the San Francisco Bay Guardian awarded the Prelingers a lifetime achievement "Goldies" award. In 2013, the reopened Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco featured the Observatory Library, curated by the Prelingers, which includes five specially prepared atlases, as well as books, government documents, magazines, and videos that "explore natural and social forces that have impacted the bay's landscape." ==Writing==

Prelinger's 2010 book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962, was inspired by the contemporary advertising found in two publications: Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets. Research for the book began as a search for untold stories of the militarized American west and the development of the atomic bomb. As Prelinger read magazine articles of the time, she realized the advertisements "formed a visual language of their own that spoke to all the historical, ideological, and technological complexities that were embedded in the massive changes of the era in history." She views human spaceflight as a cultural project, not just an industrial one, with the advertisements embedding both goals. Prelinger's second book, Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in August 2015. The book chronicles the history of electronics from the 1930s to the 1960s and the corresponding work of artists who pictured those advances: in advertising for products, personnel recruitment and company branding, as well as magazine articles and other educational efforts. "Artists bridged the gap between invention and understanding, between business and industry, and between technology and the public." Prelinger wrote in the introduction. As with her previous book, she argues that art has the power to "create the world as we wish to see it." ==References==