Unveiling "Dr. Clandestine"

Signature Books Podcast

This episode is a panel discussion about a mysterious incident in 1977, in which an anonymous writer printed hundreds of pamphlets refuting Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Mormonism—Shadow or Reality?, placed them in a storage locker, then mailed the key and a letter to bookseller Sam Weller, asking him to distribute them. The story of what happened next––told from three different perspectives of the event’s key players––unfolds in episodes published in three Signature Books titles: Ronald V. Huggins’s Lighthouse: Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism (2022); Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997 (2018), edited by Gary James Bergera; and D. Michael Quinn’s memoir, Chosen Path (forthcoming this year), annotated by Barbara Jones Brown et al. Panelists Sandra Tanner and Huggins, Bergera, and Brown share what each of these participants had to say about the incident, then evaluate what it said about Mormon studies in the 1970s.