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In 1978, just before the birth of Burning Books, Melody Sumner Carnahan and Michael Sumner were living in Palo Alto, California. The punk scene was erupting in nearby San Francisco but the peninsula was pretty dead. They decided to make a poster based on Edouard Manet's painting “The Fifer” and paste up a hundred copies all over the Stanford campus.

Midnight. Wheat paste. Permanent. This was their first collaboration.