After graduating Reed College, she embarked on a set of solo road trips through the interior western United States, visiting "landscapes", which she defines as places, not necessarily famous in the conventional sense, that have a human resonance.

The Prelinger Library was launched in 2004 as the merging of their print collections and now contains more than 40,000 publications once thought to be of mere temporary interest: magazines, pamphlets, brochures and similar items that, said Megan, "contain micro-narratives, little stories that don't always make it into books.

[4] In 2013, the reopened Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco featured the Observatory Library, curated by the Prelingers, which includes five specially prepared atlases, as well as books, government documents, magazines, and videos that "explore natural and social forces that have impacted the bay's landscape.

Overbye wrote that "it’s hard to know what to be more nostalgic about, all those childhood dreams of space opera or the optimism of an era in which imagination and technology were booming and every other ad ended with a pitch to come work for the thriving company of the future.

As Prelinger read magazine articles of the time, she realized the advertisements "formed a visual language of their own that spoke to all the historical, ideological, and technological complexities that were embedded in the massive changes of the era in history."

[10] The book chronicles the history of electronics from the 1930s to the 1960s and the corresponding work of artists who pictured those advances: in advertising for products, personnel recruitment and company branding, as well as magazine articles and other educational efforts.