Recent Catalogs from Garrett Scott, Bookseller

“Avoid Romping” 37 items, ranging from sexual dysfunction manuals, to croquet, to a fragment of very early printing in Mainz.

“In these Raggs and hungry Bowels, down, down, down” 50 items -- all either manuscript or nearly flat -- cataloged in a time of pandemic. Subjects include the joys of anti-Bell-Ringing, a lengthy letter from one of the men responsible for the creation of written vernacular Syriac, a deep dive into the history of America's most celebrated hoochie-coochie dancer, powerful letters from a woman beset by conspiracies in Regency England, and appropriate perhaps to the current mood, one will also find several Millerite items.

Occasional List 69: Damned Mob. Scribbling. 55 recently-cataloged items reflecting this bookselling concern’s longstanding if perhaps unremunerative affection for minor American literature of the middle to late 19th century—the very sort of stuff that prompted Hawthorne’s dyspeptic plaint. Not all of the authors listed here are women, but certainly none were likely to have earned much in the way of serious literary regard.

Occasional List 33: Get Schooled 47 interesting and unusual items having to do with education, including Emma Willard’s sister turning to the lottery, or a student


at Gettysburg College publishing satirical reviews of the professors of 1882, or an epitome of eccentric free speech on campus.

Occasional List 32: Things Could be Better 48 interesting and unusual items that suggest things could be better, either because the material is driven by some utopian intent or springs from some dreadful circumstance.

Occasional List 31: Where is Mabel? 30 interesting and unusual items relating to sex and exploitation and anxieties.

Occasional List 30: [The Word] 45 interesting obscure items relating to American religion: Child preachers, Religion and Lust, Christocratic Progressive utopias, an Azusa-era Exclusive Brethren tract, etc.

Occasional List 29: X+1 11 recent arrivals. Cheap early pulp prostitution exploitation fiction or quack venereal disease clinic promotional material are but a few of the items here offered. The +1 to such concupiscence might be understood to include the detailed early 19th century manuscript account book of a cooperative lottery association, or perhaps the working archive and original dummy of a mid-century Christian ventriloquist.

Occasional List 28: Handily 28 interesting items -- generally American, and generally in manuscript or made by hand -- though we have also stretched the definition to include material well-suited to fit the hand or relating to roaming clerical hands or to missing hands. Also: Tractor pulls.

Occasional List 27: Verify the Truth 29 interesting items--mostly American, mostly 19th century--ranging from a woman's account of killing a rattlesnake outside Dodge City in 1885, to a fine polygraph trade catalog, to 19th century vernacular dust jackets.

Occasional List 26: Live Wire City 33 miscellaneous items ranging across this bookselling concern’s usual array of preoccupations: American manuscript material, a splendid photographic vista of a slaughterhouse, two books from an early American olive oil advocate and reforming 19th century woman vegetarian physician, and the promotion of a school for stammerers.

Occasional List 25: Hands All Around 23 interesting and unusual items created by hand or modified by hand or somehow peculiarly intended for the hand.

Occasional List 24: Protestant Aggression 43 interesting and unusual items dealing with fervent Protestants, including 27 unusual items relating to anti-Catholic sentiments or responses to same.

Occasional List 23: This Exploits Women 26 items by or about women, from the radical to the whimsical.

Occasional List 22: Death Doom Destruction 42 interesting and uncommon items dealing in murder and mayhem and destruction both natural and unnatural: murders, prairie fires, vindictive snowfalls, Romantic deaths, a young girl in the coal pits, the romance of the Rosenbergs, glances at funeral practices and other perhaps morbid preoccupations.

Occasional List 21: Object Subject An online-only illustrated catalog, 31 items that are either remarkable objects or animated by a remarkable subject--including verses against the anti-Biblical practice of beard shaving, an impecunious accordion owner in 1850, and a covert flash novel of 1845.

Occasional List 20: Amazing with an Asterisk An online-only illustrated catalog. 33 items to demonstrate the proposition that daily life presents small instances of wonder: A kitten saves a family from a fire. Images in sawdust and resin hold images on glass. The patient application of postage stamps is the medium of an artist who once sent the Smithsonian a nail found in the stomach of a hog.

Occasional List 19: Undertakers 37 interesting items by or about people who undertake to get things done--one burial yes, but also sex, medicine, crime, and communication with the dead.

Occasional List 18: By Hand For Hand In Hand 25 unusual and interesting items somehow made by hand or for the hand, ranging from an 1877 manuscript account of labor unrest in Chicago to washcloth quintuplets.

Occasional List 17: America America This nation is weird. This online-only illustrated catalog offers 33 interesting items that embody this self-evident truth.

Occasional List 16: The Midwest This online-only illustrated catalog collects 59 interesting items having to do with the Middle Western states.

Occasional List 15: A Distinctively New Feature in Cooked Compressed Canned Meat

Or, Prolegomena to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This illustrated online-only list collects 31 items largely dealing with the myriad manifold attractions of unregulated medicine or hinting in some way at the perils of food adulteration, with forays into later questions of public health or popular medical reform.

Occasional List 14: This is Valuable Information An online-only illustrated catalog, 21 interesting and uncommon items relating in some way to American religious thought, from a scarce early Brooklyn anti-Catholic pamphlet to prophetic revelation of the secret pact made by the first President Bush with UFO demons.

Occasional List 13: People and Places 25 recent arrivals that embody some idea of interesting people or remarkable places. The people range from America’s foremost early lion tamer to a stalwart Philadelphia fireman, or from an early two-fisted Portland free-thought divorce lawyer to a 19th century railroad man and proto-Gershon Legman. The places cover such far-flung locales as homes for disabled Civil War veterans to the Delaware river set ablaze by an inventor in hopes of pecuniary gain, or from the biblical beauties of the commercial quarter of Hobart, Oklahoma to the distant missionary presses of Calcutta and New Zealand. (Even the romance of backwoods “Pittburgo” in 1761 is conjured up in a curious fictitious imprint.)

Catalogue 40 This catalogue collects arrivals hailing from the long tail of American religion, ingenious schemes, Utopian thought, radical and reactionaries, neglected literature, popular entertainments, and Hippocratic pursuits turned to a profit, the whole tending toward books, pamphlets and ephemera from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Occasional List 12: Obscure Objects

An illustrated online-only list of 20 objects of high and low culture that somehow embody a number of the preoccupations of this bookselling concern: race in America, sex and/or eugenics, popular medicine, the American endeavor of making a quick buck, and a fine work from a brilliant 19th century outsider poet-artist.