About the Collection

About the Online Bibliography

Mormon Bibliographies

This site is an electronic version of the printed bibliography A Mormon Bibliography, 1830–1930. Books, pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsides relating to the first century of Mormonism. Second edition, revised and enlarged compiled by Chad J. Flake and Larry W. Draper and published in two volumes by the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University in 2004. It is a revised and enlarged edition of the 1978 edition printed by the University of Utah Press.

The site does not provide images of the printed pages of the two volume bibliography, but rather, it contains the electronic text formatted by bibliographic fields much like a library catalog. The database contains bibliographic records (over 14,500) for the entries found in the printed bibliography. These records itemize print publications of many varieties which relate in some way to Mormonism during its first century (1830–1930). In a limited number of entries there are hyper-links added to these electronic records which link to images of the pages of the publication the entry refers to.

Searching the Database

One may search this database by Keyword All (which is a keyword search on all searchable fields at once), Title /Added Title which searches two fields, the Title field and the Added Title field, or Author which searches only the Author field. All of these searches are keyword so the order of the words in the search does not matter. An author search on Smith, Joseph gives the same results as an author search on Joseph Smith. One may also search the bibliography by publication year; if you wish to see all items published in 1840, place 1840 in both the From Year field as well as in the To Year field. Or if you wish to search a span of years, for example: 1860 to 1880, then place those search dates in the appropriate fields. The database is also searchable by Flake-Draper bibliography number and by any one of 24 non-English languages. You may also search the database by more than one search field at a time. And when the results of a search are displayed one can then sort the results by author, title or date.

It should be noted that after 2004, following the publication of the print volumes of the bibliography, additional items have been identified which meet the criteria for inclusion in the bibliography. These newly discovered items have been added to this online database. However the Flake-Draper number assigned to these new items differ slightly from the original numbers. It was decided that the use of decimal numbers (rather than alpha letters, i.e. a, b, c, d, etc.) following the typical Flake-Draper number would allow new items to more easily be placed in their proper alphabetical or chronological sequence. So, for example, the Ben E. Rich pamphlet A friendly discussion upon religious subjects published in 1900, which was discovered after 2004, should be placed between Flake-Draper 7132a and 7132b because its publication date is after 1898 but before 1905. When added to this database this item received the Flake-Draper number 7132a.5 which places it in its proper sequence. Another benefit of this new numbering method is it becomes obvious by the Flake-Draper number if the item has been added since 2004, and if so, that entry will not show up in the printed volumes. Also one can search in the Flake-Draper number field using “.5” or “.7” as the search term and the results will list most of the entries added since 2004.

Larry W. Draper