Category Archives: Uncategorized

Garrett Scott, Bookseller is proud to offer this archival grouping to benefit local political engagement: [Ann Arbor]. Edward M. Vielmetti, ed. Original typescript of the unpublished commissioned poem, “City Council,” inscribed in autograph in on the verso by the poet … Continue reading →

In mid-November, 1858, Boston shoe store clerk William H. Bryant wrote to his friend Nathaniel back in the village of Meriden, New Hampshire up in Sullivan County, I attended a wedding in the church in Clancy Street night before last. Such … Continue reading →

There’s an old saw that history is rarely written by the dissipated whore-mongers, which in part is why we might sometimes forget to give the seamier (or steamier) aspects of early American life their proper due. Happily, a corrective to … Continue reading →

From my Catalogue 31 in early 2011, I want to revisit my description of my copy of The Philosophy of Animal Magnestism, Together with the System of Manipulating Adopted to Produce Ecstasy and Somnambulism—The Effects and the Rationale. By a … Continue reading →

I get several calls a week from people who have old books. They  want to know what the books might be worth and often they want to know whether I might want to buy them. I might get three or … Continue reading →

Sometime in 1814, Stockbridge (Mass.) printer Heman Willard found himself with a problem. Even though he ran a thriving shop in the Berkshires (rivaled perhaps only by the Jeffersonian printer/publisher Phinehas Allen in Pittsfield) and had been publishing a moderately … Continue reading →

There has been some nominally droll comment of late on the title of the new David Sedaris collection, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. There are those who would class this as a bizarre book title. I would argue instead that … Continue reading →

Sometime midway through the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, one might out of understandable curiosity have opened the small “Kurious” pamphlet from George Blackie & Co. to read, We have done a large and increasing trade through the mails for … Continue reading →

“Cleanliness is conducive to health,” notes an entertaining and illuminating 1853 committee report, which continues, Who can tell, but that disease was kept from our city, the last summer, in a great degree, merely by this one establishment? Thirty-eight thousand … Continue reading →

The anecdote below is drawn from an address delivered in 1848, fairly well along in retirement by the Michigan Whig William Woodbridge–second governor of Michigan, friend to Lewis Cass, son-in-law to the Revolutionary poet John Trumbull–to the Detroit Young Men’s … Continue reading →