Ryan Handt

This is Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia librarian who began taping whatever was on television from 1975 until her death in 2012. She made a total of 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes, which is the most comprehensive collection of television during this era. She was able to pay for her recordings and storage space by investing early in Apple stock. Although she had never sent a single email, she managed to convince her friends and family to purchase Apple stock. Towards the end of her life, she had made so much money that she was able to store her tapes in nine apartments she had purchased over the years. According to film director Matt Wolf, Marion Stokes "was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions." Due to her political activism in her early years, Stokes was convinced that the government was keeping surveillance on her every move, and she became extremely cautious about her recordings. She had every right to be paranoid as she lived through the Philadelphia MOVE bombing in 1985, in which the FBI and Philadelphia police used a helicopter to drop bombs during an armed standoff with MOVE members. The bombs started a fire that eventually destroyed 61 houses and killed 11 people. Her work is currently being digitized by the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.