It is a Tuesday night, and on the quiet fourth floor of MIT’s otherwise bustling Stratton Student Center (W20), the MIT Science Fiction Society (MITSFS) is holding open hours. Inside room W20-473, colorful books line the walls from floor to ceiling.

“We aim to have a library full of science fiction and fantasy and horror, and tangentially related genres, that we can make accessible to MIT, the community, and anybody else who’s interested,” says Laura McKnight, the Society’s “vice” — a role she describes as “approximately vice president” — for the current academic year.

Just inside the door, a small plywood box is stacked on its end. This, McKnight says, is the Society’s original library. When freshman Rudolf “Rudy” Preisendorfer founded MITSFS in 1949, members would pass their books from dorm room to dorm room in this box. Things have changed a bit in the last 65 years.

“Our total book count is, last I heard, 62,270,” McKnight says. “At one point, our goal was to collect all the science fiction that had ever been published. But with the rise of self-published science fiction, that’s not even sort of possible anymore.”

Still, MITSFS (pronounced “MITS-fiss”) maintains what is believed to be the world’s largest open-shelf collection of science fiction. The Society strives to acquire every new science fiction publication for its collection, sometimes obtaining proofs before a book is officially published.

The results are staggering: In addition to the two rooms of stacks in W20, MITSFS maintains a warehouse facility for extra copies. “We do all sorts of shenanigans to try and fit as many books as possible in,” says McKnight, adding that ladders are required to reach the top shelves of paperbacks.

The age of many of the library’s materials hints at how far MITSFS has come. McKnight points out “Weird Tales” — an anthology of stories from a science fiction magazine of the same name that was published from 1923 to 1954 — beside several other periodicals that were hand-bound by members over the years. Early science fiction was primarily published in magazines, McKnight says, and the Society’s collection is full of stories that “you can’t really find many other places.”