For many people beyond Utah's borders, polygamy is a joking matter, a punch line on a late-night comedy show.
But for thousands who will pour into Utah in February for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, polygamy will be an oddity, a living artifact still on display despite its illegality.
And for the really curious, a host of new books on plural marriage -- all written by women -- are just hitting stores. Coincidence? Maybe.
A PR blurb accompanying a copy of The Secret Story of Polygamy, written by Los Angeles-based journalist Kathleen Tracy, says the book "comes at a time when the world's eyes will turn to Utah for the 2002 Winter Olympics."
"Although polygamy is illegal in the United States, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamous marriages in 1890 as a condition to the Utah territory becoming a state, the practice not only continues with the often-tacit acceptance from religious and state authorities, in many areas it is positively flourishing," Tracy writes. The book's cover features an illustration of a groom and two brides atop a wedding cake.
Other authors said their publishing dates have nothing to do with the 2002 Games. Sarah Barringer Gordon, professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, said she began work on her book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, a decade ago -- "far longer than anyone's known the Olympics would be in Salt Lake."
The book is not intended to be an exposŽ of polygamy, but a study of the arguments people made for and against it. Gordon concentrates on the nearly 40-year period between Brigham Young's public acknowledgment that Mormons were practicing polygamy and the LDS Church's 1890 renunciation.
Mary Mackert of Salt Lake City, a former polygamous wife, said she also has been working on a book, The Sixth of Seven Wives: Escape from Modern-Day Polygamy, for 10 years. The book details Mackert's 16-year marriage to Bill Draper, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Born into a polygamous family, Mackert claims she married Draper, then 49, at the age of 17. Her book is billed as the first in a series on issues surrounding polygamy; she is already at work on her second book, I Had No Pedigree: Growing Up in Modern-day Polygamy.
She claims that after she attempted to leave Draper, he had her abducted while she was delivering newspapers. She also faced threats of blood atonement from other followers.
Mackert said her book's publication could draw attention to polygamy.
"For me, the biggest problem with Utah and what we've done is to shove it under the rug and not address it," she said. "With all that's gone on with Tom Green, people are curious and they want to know."
Green, a polygamist, is currently serving a 5-year prison sentence for four counts of bigamy.
"You say 'Utah' and people immediately say, 'How many wives do you have?' " Mackert said.