Cornell University Library site
Cornell Hip Hop
Collection
Find us on Facebook Find us on Twitter Find us on Instagram

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Collection Materials

The Cornell Hip Hop Collection features more than 1,000 party and event flyers ca. 1976 - 1984, the largest known institutional collection of these scarce and important flyers, which have become increasingly valued for the details they provide about early Hip Hop culture.

View the collection

Created entirely by hand, well before widespread use of design software, these flyers preserve raw data from the days when Hip Hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx. They contain information about early Hip Hop groups, individual MCs and DJs, promoters, venues, dress codes, admission prices, shout outs and more. Celebrated designers, such as Buddy Esquire (“The Flyer King”) and Phase 2, made these flyers using magazine cutouts, original photographs, drawings, and dry-transfer letters.

To make these important historical documents more accessible to students, researchers, and community members, Cornell University Library has begun digitizing these flyers to make them searchable and freely available to the public.

The nearly 500 flyers digitized to-date include a collection of 127 flyers formerly owned by Breakbeat Lenny (Lenny Roberts), founder and co-producer (alongside his partner, Louis Flores a.k.a. Breakbeat Lou) of the influential LP compilation series “Ultimate Breaks and Beats” and flyers collected by Johan Kugelberg and donated to Cornell University Library in 2007 as part of the founding core of the Hip Hop Collection.

Copyright Information

The images in the Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers collection are made available for non-profit, educational use. Higher resolution versions of the images may be requested by contacting rareref@cornell.edu. There is a standard fee of $25 per high-resolution file, and a cost of $65 per hour of work done by our staff to fulfill your request.

Although Cornell University Library is not aware of any U.S. copyright protection (17 U.S.C.) on the flyers and other materials made available on this site (unless otherwise indicated) permission and possible fees may be required from the owners of any copyright independently of the Library. It is the researcher's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in this collection. Researchers must make their own assessments of rights in light of their intended use.

If you have any more information about an item you've seen on our website or if you are the author or copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you, we want to hear from you. Please contact rareref@cornell.edu with your contact information and a link to the relevant content.