Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers
About this collection
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.
To make these important historical documents more accessible to students, researchers, and community members, Cornell University Library has begun digitizing these flyers to make them searchable and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.
Historical context
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.
Using the collection
The items in this digital collection have been geocoded and can be browsed by location, as well as by year, venue, performer names, and designer, when known.
For more information about this collection, contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts and Ben Ortiz, Collection Specialist, Cornell Hip Hop Collection
- Metadata creation
- Cornell University Library
- Credits
- This collection overview was last reviewed by Katherine Reagan, collection steward, in 2025.
- Collection sources