Moving the archive one floorboard at a time!

Our old library at 1345 W. 1st St.

A Bob Baker show has just finished and you might have struck up a conversation with a puppeteer. Maybe you have particular interest in vinyl, or National Geographic magazine collections, or the concept art for our marionettes! If you are lucky (really super lucky), a Bob Baker staff member might have taken you upstairs and shown you the most hidden and fantastic world in the entire Theater– the Bob Baker archive and library!

Once used functionally as Bob Baker’s office, the archive is home to thousands of LPs, reel to reel recordings, cassette tapes, concept art, books, magazines, and more– all stacked floor to ceiling! It was the room that most frequently made visitors say to us… “And how are you going to move that?!?!”

Led by an incredible and dedicated team at our Theater, the archive is moving book by book, LP by LP. However, there was one often overlooked feature underneath the stacks of books and music. The floorboards! And little did we know that just outside the archive door we had quite the collection of overflow redwood floorboards… the very same ones that Bob put down in what we now call our archive (his former office). We simply had to take them with us to pay homage to this incredible and singular room.

After making a few phone calls, we approached our pal Frank Fairfield with a seemingly impossible task. Could he take these slightly wonky floorboards and put them on our new Theater’s slightly wonky floor? We had a dream to cover up the floor of our new library space with something that felt like home and he understood perfectly. All this week, with lots of elbow grease and care, Frank finished putting in Bob’s original floorboards in our new library and it looks a little something like this!

A chunk of the floor in our new library! Looks like home… now we just need to move everything over.