Public Collectors produces a range of publications, from exhibition guides and collection inventories, to publications that act as stand-alone curatorial explorations. Some of these publications are free by request. Others can be purchased from Half Letter Press. If you have ideas for a publications that could be produced through Public Collectors, please let me know at: marc [at] publiccollectors.org

This booklet consists of sample findings (or excerpts from publications) that were originally posted on the Public Collectors blog (publiccollectors.tumblr.com). In November 2010, I published a booklet titled Paper Blog that included a selection drawn from nearly 650 blog posts from between September 2009 and November 2010. This follow up collects examples from December 2010 through November 2012. Public Collectors on Tumblr is intended as a casual, more personal supplement to the main Public Collectors website. I update the blog almost every day. It is a place for small things and for fragments of larger things. It is also an account of the contents of my home and digital files from my camera. If you have a question about something in this booklet, or if you are in Chicago or passing through and would like to see something in person, please feel free to contact me.

These drawings by a fashion illustrator or designer named D. 'Jame come from the collection of Michael Thomas, an artist based in Chicago. Thomas found the drawings at a thrift store in Chicago, located on Broadway Avenue near Devon. He writes: “They were priced at $5 per drawing. I could only afford one and was unable to decide. The owner of the store said he was tired of having them around and I could buy them all for $20. There are thirty-three drawings. He said there had been more, but they had been sold.” The drawings are dated from 1970-77.

The store owner purchased the drawings as part of a lot at an estate sale in Northern Indiana. No other information about D. ’Jame is known.

This booklet was produced for the exhibition "Archival Impulse" at University of Illinois at Chicago, which includes all of D.'Jame's drawings from Michael's collection, as well as additional collections on loan from other Public Collectors participants.

"I had no musical ability and I wasn’t old enough to be a college radio DJ. I was into art and writing but needed something much more interesting to work on than the high school yearbook. I wanted to contribute to the underground music and publishing communities, make new friends and interview my favorite bands. So from 1988 until 1991 I published Primary Concern, a thick photocopied ‘zine that I wrote, designed, printed, and assembled with few outside contributors."

So begins a personal essay by Marc Fischer of Public Collectors (as well as Temporary Services and Half Letter Press) about photocopied, self-published hardcore and metal music 'zines in the late 1980s and early 90s. In addition to a nearly 2000 word essay, this booklet includes full and quarter page reproductions of cover art from 33 'zines from this period (including one cover from Fischer's 'zine Primary Concern). Other titles included are Total Thrash, I4NI, Philly 'Zine, Bullshit Monthly, The Happy Thrasher and Poser Death. Fischer's essay gets into many of the mechanics of self-publishing back then, from illegally recycling postage stamps to conducting band interviews:

"Band interviews were conducted through the mail, in person, or recorded over the phone using speakerphone or a cheap suction cup mic. In some cases I looked up band members’ phone numbers using directory assistance. For the bigger groups, record labels would schedule interview times and have band members call people from the label’s office. One of my favorite memories of doing a ‘zine was imploring my mom not to embarrass me by picking up the phone one afternoon because Jeff Hanneman from Slayer was going to be calling. For all I knew, Jeff Hanneman might have still been living with his parents too. Many band members still lived with Mom and Dad."

This booklet was made to accompany a presentation of around two hundred 'zines made during this period from Fischer's collection that will take place at The STOREFRONT on Saturday and Sunday, August 6 & 7, 2011, from 12-5 PM at: 2606 N California Avenue, Chicago, IL.

This booklet consists of scans of personal ads taken from American Swingers Magazine, Volume 2, Number 1, 1974, published by Amerigala Publications in York, PA. Issues of American Swingers Magazine consist of hundreds of ads for individuals or couples that swing and are seeking other swingers. Most of the ads in American Swingers Magazine feature partially nude portraits that include the person’s face. AMBIGUOUS ADS focuses on personal ads where the individual in the ad has somehow obscured their face.

This booklet was compiled and designed by Marc Fischer. All of the ads were originally printed in black and white. Here they are enlarged by at least 200%. The ads were also accompanied by texts describing the kind of partner that each person (or couple) was looking for. Those texts have been omitted except for the location of the person depicted.

This is the second version of AMBIGUOUS ADS. The first version was printed in August 2010 and features photos take from issue number 38 of the magazine Select, published in New Jersey in 1972.

This booklet contains an interview with Marc Fischer of Public Collectors by Madeline Coleman that was originally conducted for the blog of the Montreal-based magazine Maisonneuve. Coleman’s introduction is followed by a slightly longer version of the interview that was posted to maisonneuve.org on February 28, 2011. Interview provides one of the fuller accounts of the background and intentions behind the project. The discussion includes thoughts on why individuals need to step up and share resources and experiences that museums lack, uses of the project so far, collecting versus hoarding, why a personal museum devoted to Vanilla Ice matters and more!

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a patent as: “a writing securing for a term of years the exclusive right to make, use, or sell an invention.”

Recently Google.com introduced the ability to search the database of U.S. patents online and download each application in PDF form.

Patent application drawings present a clinical view of each object, devoid of its sensual material qualities, freed from surface colors and textures, and often exploded into its constituent parts in a way that makes feelings of nostalgia or other kinds of desire harder to access. These are the lowly origin stories of products. Some have gone on to lives of mass availability, such as the spoon and fork combination known as the “Spork.” Others never went into production.

The absurd decision-making in so many patents is immediately apparent. How was it determined that an extremely complicated apparatus should be inserted inside a doll to make it cry or wink? How was it decided that dolphins should appear on a cremation urn? What did dolphins do to deserve to be on a container for human cremains? What compelled an inventor to put a human head on the end of a dildo?

Currently over seven million applications can be viewed online. This folio presents a highly subjective selection of drawings from this vast well of material. Among the seventy applications here, I’ve included drawings from:

Anatomical Doll for Child Abuse Investigations; Miniature Coffin Cigarette Case; Shark Protector Suit; Magnetic Pendulum Device for Feline Amusement and Exercise; Surrogate Sexual Partner; Bird Scaring Device; Inflatable Humanoid Forms; Flatulence Deodorizer; Method of Making a Readily Portable Burrito; Facial Liquid Excreting Doll; Arm Restraint Device for Children Afflicted with a Compulsive Biting Disorder; Gender Neutral Doll Body with Replaceable Photographic Face; Multiple Bladed Retractable Claw Weapon; Apparatus for Exercising the Penis; War on Terrorism Flag.

In some cases I printed the first page of the application, which includes a title. For other applications I only included my favorite drawing and left the function or purpose of the object open to speculation.

Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.

This booklet consists of sample findings (or excerpts from publications) that were originally posted on the Public Collectors blog (publiccollectors.tumblr.com). These images are a selection pulled from nearly 650 images and scans that I posted between September 2009 and November 2010.

Public Collectors on Tumblr is intended as a casual, more personal supplement to the main Public Collectors website. I update the blog almost every day. It is a place for small things and for fragments of much larger things. It is also an account of the contents of my apartment and digital files from my camera. If you have a question about something in this booklet, or if you are in Chicago or passing through and would like to see something in person, please feel free to contact me.

This booklet consists of scans of personal ads taken from issue number 38 of the swingers magazine Select, published in New Jersey in 1972. Issues of Select consist of thousands of ads for individuals or couples that swing and are seeking other swingers. Most of the ads in Select feature partially nude portraits that include the person’s face. AMBIGUOUS ADS focuses on personal ads where the individual in the ad has somehow obscured their face. These are, perhaps, the swingers that were not quite ready to go public with their lifestyle choice.

This booklet was compiled and designed by Marc Fischer. All of the ads were originally printed in black and white. Here they are enlarged by 250%. The ads were also accompanied by texts describing the kind of partner that each person (or couple) was looking for. Those texts have been omitted except for the location of the person depicted

This booklet compiles all of the drawings of buildings in the Mexican comic story collection Libro Collección La Flama, number 39, directed and edited by Francisco Campos Silva and published by Ediciones Joma in D.F., Mexico. Each story in this publication, which is intended strictly for adults, is filled with dramatic scenes of sex and violence. Breaking up the graphic images are these drawings of the architecture where these tales of lust and anger take place. This booklet reproduces all of the panels with those structures, in the order that they appear, at actual size. Compiled and designed by Marc Fischer

This very small edition folio of materials, housed in a plastic sleeve, accompanied an exhibition of 11 books by the late conceptual artist Don Celender at the recently founded Public Collectors Study Center in Chicago. The folio includes a cardstock cover, a 20 page booklet with an essay on Celender by Marc Fischer and a synopses for each book in the show, a color postcard, a full length version of Celender's CV, 2 facsimile pages from Celender's book "Opinions of Working People on the Arts" and a copy of Celender's obituary from the New York Times.