For the 55 years that the Bob Baker Marionette Theater resided at 1345 W. 1st Street, the library and archives served as Bob Baker’s personal studio for creating productions throughout his lifetime. In addition to hundreds of theater performances and roadshows, Bob Baker Productions was also heavily involved in Hollywood theatrical productions and commercial studios. This work extended to special effects props and puppets from movies and television such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Star Trek, and The Liberace Show, among others. The source material and inspiration for the conception of these works is what makes up our collections including the records, cassette tapes and ¼” audio tape that made the soundtracks for each show; concept art of puppets and sets designs; audiovisual materials that document appearances and performances; as well as books, magazines and image clippings that were compiled into a visual reference library that since Bob was working before the Internet.

Our library and archives is not yet available to the public while we continue to build out the space and unpack our holdings. However, this is something we hope to make possible in the future and are slowly working toward. If you would like to support this vision of our library and archives you can provide donations of supplies needed for safe storage and preservation included on the Amazon Wish List (library specific supplies have a description indicating what they are for), or make an online donation specifying in the “Additional Information” section that you would like these funds to go to the library and archives.

In the meantime, a smaller collection of photographs, negatives, slides, print materials, correspondence, ephemera, scrapbooks, photo albums and audio cassettes is available by appointment through the Special Collections Department at the Los Angeles Public Library. A finding aid for the material in their collection can be found here.

ADAM FOSTER, Head Archivist

BRIANNA TOTH, Assistant Archivist

Adam began volunteering at the theater in 2016 shortly after he moved to Los Angeles, and soon became the theater’s first archivist. Brianna began assisting Adam in September of 2017 with the 1/4” audio tape collection, and began helping with the library as a whole later that year. After the theater announced it was leaving their Echo Park location in the Fall of 2018, they were responsible for moving the ~1,000 linear feet of these materials to the new theater space in Highland Park, which was completed in the Summer of 2019.

Both Adam and Brianna were 2018-2019 recipients of the UCLA/Mellon Foundation Internship Project, which was part of Dr. Michelle Caswell's UCLA Community Archives Lab. It was with the grant funding provided by the Mellon that they were able to document the Theater's collections and move the library and archives to the new location.

They have presented their work at the Theater for the 2018 Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Annual Conference panel: "The Bob Baker Marionette Theater: Archiving with Oral Histories" and have also published on it for the Spring 2019 Performance! Newsletter of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Performing Arts Section in the article "Preserving Place: Moving the Bob Baker Marionette Theater."