Two new blogs launched yesterday (for all intents and purposes).

The first, Browsing The Stacks: A Mormon Book Collecting Blog, will be an exploration of rare and collectible Mormon books. At the JI we talk about books in terms of their historiographical value. At BTS, we’ll talk about books more in terms of collectibility (and thus, sometimes $$ value : ). For example, John Lewis Lund’s Understanding Your Patriarchal Blessing may not have had much of an impact on our collective understanding of the history of patriarchal blessings (it never hit store shelves), a the few that remain today command a pricetag of hundreds of dollars. We’ll be talking about the fun stories behind such books, and hopefully great guest posts from long-time collectors/book dealers on a variety of topics related to Mormon book collecting. My friend Bret S. is my coblogger there.

Second, La Voz del Desierto: Un Blog de Historia Mormona is an academically themed blog about Mormon history (hmm…wonder where that idea came from) in Spanish. Often I will provide there translations of some of the material on JI, and other times there will be original posts and discussion about Mormon history and other Mormon themes.

You’ll find both blogs under “More Islands and Atolls” on the Mormon Archipelago (Box 5, as Dave would indicate). And, you can also “like” each on Facebook.

Happy Reading!