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The David Jacobs Archive documents the life and work of the writer, activist, and post-Situationist thinker David Jacobs (b. ca. 1955), a central figure in the American reception and transformation of Situationist thought from the early 1970s into the twenty-first century. Spanning roughly 1971 to 2010 and housed in two bankers' boxes.
The collection comprises manuscripts, student papers, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and an extensive run of rare and previously unrecorded publications produced by Jacobs and his collaborators in the Bay Area groups Point-Blank!, Collective Inventions, and Collective Reinventions. The collection opens with primary-source records of Jacobs's adolescence as a student organizer in Palo Alto, including issues of the underground newspaper Radical Rag (no holdings located on OCLC), materials from his lawsuit against the Palo Alto Unified School District, contemporaneous press accounts of his 1970 arrest during a high school strike, and Freedom of Information Act documents revealing state surveillance of Jacobs and his fellow members of the Radical Student Union while they were still minors. His undergraduate essays from UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley—on Marx, commodity fetishism, alienation, and French revolutionary history—trace the intellectual development that led, with Chris Winks and Chris Shutes, to the founding of Point-Blank! around 1971. The Point-Blank! and Collective Inventions series together constitute one of the most complete extant records of American post-Situationist graphic and theoretical production. They include the group's full pamphlet output, posters, maquettes, and several titles unrecorded in OCLC—among them On Contradiction, AT&T Express, and a fare-protest poster issued under the imprint "Malcontents United for No Increase." The archive also contains the 1973 pamphlet Space Travel: An Official Guide for San Francisco Commuters, whose cover bears the earliest documented printed appearance of the "Nowhere Bus" image later made internationally famous by Jamie Reid on the sleeve of the Sex Pistols' 1977 single "Pretty Vacant." The attribution of the image remains contested, but the dating evidence assembled here—including several additional early Point-Blank! uses—materially advances the scholarly record. The correspondence series documents Jacobs's international network of radical interlocutors, including French Resistance veteran Pierre Lanneret, Québécois post-Situationist Patrick Straram, Swiss-based anarchist archivist Marianne Enckell of the Centre International de Recherches sur l'Anarchisme, the Estonian collective Punamust, Loren Goldner, Noam Chomsky, and several incarcerated correspondents requesting Collective Inventions zines. Together with the manuscript drafts of Jacobs's published and unpublished writings, the archive offers an unusually intact firsthand record of an American radical milieu and its transatlantic and carceral entanglements.
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