Congratulations to the 2026 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize Winner, Laura Helton

The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) is thrilled to announce the winners for the 2026 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize for the bibliography of American history and literature.  The prize committee selected the following works from a robust pool of applicants:

The winner of the 2026 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize is Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

In Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, an extraordinary range of Black collectors coalesces into a powerful narrative of meaning-making and institution-building. Arguing that “the generative and unruly practice of archiving became central to Black intellectual and social life in the early twentieth century,” Helton plumbs both the “tactile” and the “social” dimensions of collectors’ accomplishment: “They assembled files and scrapbooks, but they also assembled people, turning their collections into gathering spaces for the study of Black ideas.” Helton’s cast of characters is impressive and ingeniously assembled: now-recognized library giants Arturo Schomburg and Dorothy Porter; ephemeral scrapbook-maker L. S. Alexander Gumby and collector of World War II letters L. D. Reddick; and “bookladies” Virginia Lee in Roanoke, Virginia’s Gainsboro Library and Vivian D. Harsh of Chicago’s George Cleveland Hall Branch Library. Grounded in deep archival research and beautifully written, Scattered and Fugitive Things makes a signal contribution not just to Black bibliography but to bibliography writ large. Helton’s exceptional study will inform and expand conversations in Native American and Indigenous studies, queer studies, religious studies, and beyond about how archives function as personal and communal sites of creativity, organization, and activism.