James Molloy and Sales of Recusant Books to the United States

This essay explains how James Molloy assembled some 19,850 mainly Catholic items in the British Isles and sold them to five different American libraries from 1968 to 1984, the year of his death. The most important portion in these sales was 7500 recusant items—that is, those written for English Catholic audiences from 1558 to 1829 (the penal period). This transference of recusant books filled a void in the holdings of American libraries, where, before Molloy’s sales began, only 1550 different publications existed, according to a 1964 study by Lois Byrns.