Born Marion Marguerite Butler on November 25, 1929, in Germantown, Philadelphia, Marion Stokes was a librarian, civil rights activist, television producer, investor, and archivist. She passed away on December 14, 2012, at age 83 in Philadelphia.
Stokes is best known for her extraordinary commitment to recording television news—24 hours a day for 35 years, from 1977 until her death. Her project amassed over 70,000 tapes, stored across nine properties and three storage units. What some called hoarding, others recognized as visionary archiving.
Her work was spotlighted in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, which described her efforts as a form of guerrilla archiving, preserving media history that might otherwise have been lost.
She was married to John Stokes Jr., with whom she co-produced the socially conscious TV show Input in the late 1960s.
Macintosh computers
Stokes bought many Macintosh computers. Until the time of her death, 192 of the computers remained in her possession. Stokes kept the unopened items in a climate-controlled storage garage for posterity. The collection, speculated to be one of the last of its nature remaining, sold on eBay to an anonymous buyer Stokes invested in Apple stock with capital from her in-laws while the company was still fledgling. Later, she encouraged her already rich in-laws to invest in Apple, advice they took and profited from. Stokes then allocated part of her profits to her recording project.
Legacy
Stokes bequeathed the entire tape collection to her son Michael Metelits, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes’s death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco,[3] a move that cost her estate $16,000.[21] It was the largest collection the Internet Archive had ever received.[22] The organization agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2022, the project is still incomplete, partially due to lack of funding.[23][24][3]
A documentary about her life, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,[25] was directed by Matt Wolf[26] and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival.[27][6][28] A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than seven hundred hours of Stokes’s tapes, titled Input, was published in Fall of 2023.[29]
