Laurel Doody Library Supply was founded to help with the challenges facing artists publishing on a small scale. The project works to distribute these rare and careful publications beyond artists’ social circles, while providing for their long-term safekeeping.

Once a year, the project assembles a group of artist books and exhibition-related material and donates full sets to seven public archives in France, the United States, Puerto Rico, and New Zealand. In exchange, these partner archives agree never to deaccession the works and to tag them as part of the Laurel Doody Library Supply collection: an archive within archives. The annual deposit includes collected ephemera from artist-run galleries, audio recordings on vinyl, and self-published zines. These selected materials serve as a method of preservation, following a conversation as it unfolds through art. With this effort in mind, the project commissions a new artist book each year.

The Library Supply continues the legacy of Laurel Doody, a project space run out of an apartment in Miracle Mile, Los Angeles for twelve months in 2015–2016, with the intention of both tracing a loose network of friends, spaces and shows and extending these ongoing conversations to a wider audience.