“A swindler of widows all over the country”: On selling the paper residue of the weird old America
Schedule
Wed, 17 Sep, 2025 at 04:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
1200 E 7th St, Bloomington, IN, United States, Indiana 47405 | Bloomington, IN
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Join IU Libraries Lilly Library for an evening with Garrett Scott, antiquarian bookseller and champion of the strange and overlooked.For more than twenty-five years, Scott has specialized in the odd corners of American print culture, supplying collectors, museums, and libraries with pamphlets promising miracle cures, broadsides from utopian dreamers, and the promotional literature of new religious movements. His expertise has earned him membership in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America as well as a long-standing role on the faculty and now as director of CABS-Minnesota, the premier training program for the rare book trade.
In this lecture, Scott makes a spirited case for why eccentric and ephemeral works deserve a place in great libraries alongside the pillars of art, science, and literature. Drawing especially on itinerant and outsider religious Americana, he will show how these seemingly marginal objects capture forgotten voices and some of the more peculiar chapters of American life.
Scott’s talk will be accompanied by a pop-up exhibition by the Lilly Library’s Curator of Religious Collections, Sarah McElroy Mitchell. The Lilly Library invites audiences to consider what collections preserve, what they overlook, and why even the flimsiest pamphlet or the strangest biography deserves a place in the historical record.
Schedule
4:30 p.m. Pop-up exhibition opens
5:30 p.m. Lecture begins
6:30 p.m. Reception and continued pop-up exhibition
This event is free, but do to space limitations, RSVP is required; please visit https://events.iu.edu/bloomington/event/garrett-scott
This program is supported by a generous grant from the Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative of Lilly Endowment, Inc.
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Where is it happening?
1200 E 7th St, Bloomington, IN, United States, Indiana 47405Event Location & Nearby Stays:
