Bancroftiana, Number 118 Spring 2001: Collecting the California Feminist Press Materials

Collecting the California Feminist Press Materials

Women in California have been forerunners in feminist writing, printing, and publishing of the Women's Movement of the late 1960s and libraries in the UC system have been instrumental in collecting and preserving some of these materials. The Bancroft Library has collected fine press titles for many years including all the works of Kelsey Street Press, a women-owned press located in Berkeley that publishes women's experimental prose and poetry. UC Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections has collected the works and archives of HerBooks, Papier Mache Press and Shameless Hussy Press. These archives contain first editions, manuscripts, correspondence, etc. However, no one library in the state was collecting comprehensively the output of all California feminist press publications. And as publishing costs have risen, many smaller presses have been forced out of business and their archives lost or given to repositories outside of the state.

Seeing a critical need for a systematic identification of California feminist press publications and for an organized plan for the collection and preservation of these materials and archival files, the UC Women's Studies Consortium consisting of UC women's studies librarians began in 1994 the California Feminist Presses Project. A survey was made of all known current feminist presses in California requesting information about their annual publishing output, size and cost of backlist, and plans for depositing of archives. About 18 presses were identified including several from the Bay Area: Aunt Lute Books, Down There Press, Feminist Bookstore News, Frog in the Well, Kelsey St. Press, Post-Apollo Press, Third Woman Press, and Woman in the Moon Publications. To ensure that students and scholars would have access to all the publications of these presses Consortium members next assigned each UC campus responsibility for acquiring a circulating copy of all publications of presses assigned to them. The Bancroft Library along with UC Santa Cruz Library accepted responsibility for purchasing an archival copy for the output of the northern California feminist presses. UC Santa Barbara became the depository for the archival copies of publications of southern California feminist presses. All the publications added to the collections were to be catalogued in Melvyl and local campus catalogs with an added entry under "California Feminist Presses Collection" so that researchers studying the history of feminist publishing could readily find a list of all those titles published in California.

The Woman Without Experiences, Book jacket design, Kelsey St. Press Records.

Jacquelyn Marie, UCSC Women's Studies librarian and Beth Sibley, UCB Women's Studies librarian became cocoordinators of the project and have maintained regular contact with the presses to ensure that their publications and archive files are collected and preserved. Publications and archives of defunct presses are also being sought as are new presses to be added to the project. This year Girls Press joined the project list with UCLA agreeing to buy the circulating copy and UCSB the archival copy. Since the project began, Bancroft has added hundreds of titles to its Feminist Presses Collection.

Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories, Book jacket design, Kelsey St. Press Records.

For more information about the California Feminist Presses Collection contact Tony Bliss, Rare Book Librarian, abliss@library.berkeley.edu, or Beth Sibley, Women's Studies Librarian, esibley@library.berkeley.edu.

—Elizabeth Sibley
Women's Studies Librarian