The following is a brief excerpt from Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Stephen G. Gilbert now available in print.

Tattoo Archive: by Chuck Eldridge

There are quite a few hats that I wear here. I'm a tattooer, I have a mail order business, selling posters and post cards and stuff, and then I do quarterly newsletters, so I do a lot of writing and research on the history of tattooing. The mail order business - that aspect of the Tattoo Archive actually started when I first started getting tattooed, which was in 1965. I started collecting business cards and such then - and flash, and machines if I could afford them. And then as things went on I would go to conventions and meet more and more tattooers and others who were interested in the history of tattooing, so I came up with the idea of - instead of buying just a single one of these items that comes my way - a book, or whatever - I would buy whatever I could afford and I would resell them to kind of cater to these other collectors.

The mail order aspect of the Archive actually grew out of my desire to collect. The first catalog had 12 items, and now I think I have about 400 or so: posters, postcards, books, videos, all sorts of things like that. Mostly paper items, which is my obsession.

I did an apprenticeship with Ed Hardy in the mid-seventies in San Francisco and I've been tattooing ever since. I worked for Hardy, and then I worked for Paul Jeffries for a while, and for Dean Dennis in San Francisco, and then for Goldfield in San Francisco, and then in the mid-eighties I got my own shop here in Berkeley. So I've been working here at this same location on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley since then.

The research aspect of the Archive - that's the quarterly newsletter, which is called "The Archive File", is 10 or 12 years old now. That evolved out my collecting again. I would gather all this information up, and being an Aries I kept it in some sort of filing system so I had access to it. And then organizations such as National would ask me to write historical stuff, so I started trying to assemble this information into some kind of form that people could decipher. I wrote for quite a few years for the newsletters: "National", "Tattoo Life", and "Tattoo Buzz" in England, and "Tattoo International".

All the stuff that I was writing was all historical. I'd tell people "I only write about people that are dead. And there seemed to be more and more interest in tattoo history, so about 10 or 12 years ago I actually started a quarterly historical newsletter which is known as the "Archive File". It's a relatively modest newsletter. At this point it has kind of evolved into one continuing article which I call "Tattoo History from A to Z". Back in the 80's I started writing for Lyle Tuttle's "Tattoo Historian" and came up with a column idea. It was "Tattoo History from A to Z", and I started with the letter A in the alphabet and now I'm up to M, so it's taken me almost a decade to get up to the middle of the alphabet. So it's kind of a lifetime project, I think. There are about 100 people who subscribe to the "Archive File".