Literature of the American West

COWBOY BOOTS BOOKPLATES (Sample available)
art by Geraktv. Condition: NEW package of 10 bookplates made by pacaritambo books. The peel-off label stock is heavier than most bookplate materials and is matte and not glossy. We can also personalize the bookplates if you like - email us the name you want on the bookplate. They are as perfect as possible, and we feel the subject matter is much different than you can get anywhere else. 2.5" H x 3.50" W. Content: Brown cowboy books with spurs highlight this "weathered" orange-brown background - you can also see a Stetson and a cow skull - all of which represent the American Old West. Any questions or for a sample, click here to email us.
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BELLE STARR: A Novel of the Old West (Uncorrected Proof)
by Deborah Camp. Condition: NEW 1998 Harmony large Trade Paperback, Uncorrected Proof. An Uncorrected Proof is the complete book as originally intended for publication and sent to bookstores and experts for comment and/or corrections. Usually you get "more" book with a Proof. Content: Belle Starr was a real woman of the plains. At the age of 16 she was a spy with Quantrill's Raiders and fell in love with Cole Younger, a member of the James Gang. Now the facts of her life have been woven into a magnificient novel of the West told from a woman's point of view that will make all readers feel the passions and sweep of America's heritage. Belle was a woman who took control of her life at a time when most women (and men) were filled with self-doubt, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War. There have been many untrue tales told of Belle, even in her own lifetime, blaming her for just about every crime committed in Oklahoma's Indian Territory, calling her a prostitute - or worse. Belle's real-life character shows true grit, bravery, and complexity. [1 copy available]
$ 3.65 + $ 3.39 media shipping

BEST TALES OF THE YUKON
by Robert W. Service. B&W decorations. Condition: UNREAD 1983 Running Press Books Trade Paperback edition, 6th printing. Tiny edgewear with thin binder's glue wrinkles down spine. Content: Ok, maybe the "Yukon" isn't traditionally a subject for the American West category, but the stories and the characters involved in the era are archetypes of the American West. So - here it is. This book presents all of the classic works from The Spell of the Yukon and Ballads of a Cheechako by the masterful yarn-spinner who chronicled the Klondike gold rush and the savage beauty of the Frozen north. Includes the classic poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and the ever popular "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 5.29 + $ 3.09 media shipping.

THE BUFFALO COMMONS
by Larry McMurtry. Historical Fiction. Condition: NEW 1998 Forge hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), first edition, first printing. Content: This novel takes on the most controversial subjects in the West today - the environment, endangered species, and saving the family farm/ranch. Laslo Honorey, a multi-millionaire, wants to defeat the spread of agribusiness on the High Plains and -- along with federal regulators and environmentalists -- nationalize thousands of miles of grasslands and rebuild them as buffalo grazing grounds (a ``buffalo commons''). But what of the Nichols family, which has ranched the grasslands for over a century? Must their way of life fade away? A serious novel for Westerners. [1 copy available]
$ 7.65 + $ 3.29 media shipping

BUFFALO GIRLS
by Larry McMurtry. Historical Fiction. Condition: Near Fine1990 Simon & Schuster hardcover & DJ (near-fine in mylar jacket). First edition. Content: This book centers around the life of the legendary Calamity Jane. She is as real and moving a heroine as McMurtry has ever created, whether in his contemporary novels, like Terms of Endearment, or his historical ones. The arrival od Buffalo Bill Cody plunges Calamity Jane into her last, bittersweet adventure as part of Cody's "Wild West Show". Reviewer: "McMurtry spends a lot of time setting and introducing the characters. Sad book, about the final gasps of the Old West." Read the book; see the movie. [1 copy available]
$ 8.65 + $ 3.19 media shipping

CANNIBAL ELIOT AND THE LOST HISTORIES OF SAN FRANCISCO
(Historical Fiction)
by Hilton Obenzinger. B&W drawing of Eliot. Condition: UNREAD, but not perfect, 1994 Mercury House (San Francisco) Trade Paperback, first edition, first printing. Shelfwear has taken it's toll here: edgewear and rubbings along hinges. Interior perfect. Content: Those who fancy historical fiction with an emphasis on the historical will relish Obenzinger's collection of seven fictional first-person accounts depicting San Francisco life from its early European settlement in 1776 to the major earthquake of 1906. In the late 1700s, Father Martin de Landaeta, a missionary who is zealous to the point of cruelty, describes the "paternal ministrations" he uses to teach Indians about Spanish power in this life and about eternal reward in the next. In the mid-19th century, William "Cannibal" Eliot portrays San Francisco as a rough-and-ready boomtown where there are fewer opportunities for its flood of "Argonauts" (immigrants from all over the globe) than for men like Samuel Brannan, a corrupt Mormon and civic leader, a "criminal who will rid the city of its criminals." A later "document" tells of a woman who goes on trial for murdering her married lover. The city is titillated by the scandal, and Hattie Fisk, a newspaper typesetter, records the proceedings while providing a glimpse of her own situation and of her hopes as a working woman and suffragist who must make her way in a man's world. Great stories! [1 copy available]
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THE DONNER PARTY (Historical Poetry)
by George Keithley. Condition: UNREAD 1989 George Braziller Trade Paperback, first printing. Light edge wear with small shelf wear to several page fore edges. Not bad. Interior perfect. Content: This is a good book length poem, which interweaves lyrical narratives that stride along at a quick yet even pace, like oxen over flat and dry ground, with brief poems which provide emotional reality to the text. The prose is crisp and clear, and the lines have an engaging rhythm. The poet pays close attention to the sounds he uses, and they mesh well, with many close rhymes at the end of the 3 line stanzas, and intriguing internal rhymes as well. It is both a very sensual and dramatic work, yet at the same time possess a kind of puritanism and serious spirit in the voice of the narrator, the head of the Donner party. There are some serious questions asked about the nature of the pioneer's interpretation of the American spirit and broaches broader topics like the relationship that the 19th century expansion had with the natives and the environment. Ultimately, the answers to these questions meant life and death for the Donner party, and are still of great importance to our consideration of our own lifestyles and goals today. I found it to be an intriguing and honest look into a subject that quite often invites sensationalism, as well as being a solid piece of poetry that doesn't suffer the open sentimentality or suffocating politics that afflcit many works about American history. At its best its iron wheels ring with the same clear tones as the brozne shields of the iliad, for the most part it sings with the prairie winds heard in the works of Whitman, Cather, McMurtry and William Carlos Williams." [1 copy available]
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FROM NOWHERE (A Rest of the West novel) (Signed Copy)
by Ron McGinley. Signed on title page. Condition: UNREAD 1995 Branded Publishing (Frederick, MD) paperback. No edition given. Light rubbings front cover with rubbings along front hinge. Near-crease front cover from signing. Interior perfect. Content: Wade Tildman, a killer of killers, an Indian fighter, a man from nowhere. Matty McPherson, alone, beautiful, no husband, owner of a broken down ranch with cattle scattered over the countryside. Matt Warner, a young orphan, who can't talk after seeing his family massacred. Together they must find the courage to brave untold odds in a harsh land and build a new future. See justice dispensed Wade Tildman style. [1 copy available]
$ 4.00 + $ 2.97 media shipping

GRANT OF KINGDOM
by Harvey Fergusson. Intro by William Pilkington. Condition: Good + 1975 Univ. of NM Press Trade Paperback, first printing. Binder's glue string down spine and small edgewear bottom cover/interior tight but there are several pages with underlining. Content: Historical fiction of the fabled and fabulous Maxwell Land Grant of New Mexico which hosted everyone from the Spanish to the Apache to Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. The history of the Maxwell family is one of the most interesting in Southwest history. [1 copy available]
$ 6.89 + $ 3.29 shipping

MOUNTAIN BLOOD
by Will Baker. B&W photos illustrate. Condition: UNREAD 1988 Touchstone Trade Paperback, first printing. Light edgewear. Content: In his introduction, the author wrestles with the distinction between fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary. Baker, an English professor at the University of California, is the first winner of the Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Non-Fiction, an award administered by a national union of universities. His seven pieces encompass reminiscence, personal experience and reflections on historyembellished by imagination. A small boy catches his first trout; a youth in Idaho's lumber country works in a sawmill and thinks about his girl. Later, the author, in search of a disreputable great-uncle, remembers with bitterness his own failed marriage. Stories about his prospector grandfather lead him to abandoned mines in Mexico and a self-sufficient native family. Baker meditates on suburbs that now occupy Indian hunting grounds in "Letter to a Nebraska Housewife." His tales are powerful evocations of the American West, past and present. [1 copy available]
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OKLAHOMA GOLD
by Mike Edwards. Cover art by D. Cude. Condition: NEW 1995 NPI Trade Paperback first edition, first printing. Tiny edgewear. Content: Intrigued by the legend of buried Indian gold and tired of the cattle drive, Big Bob and his fellow cowboys decide to try their luck at treasure hunting on the Oklahoma-Arkansas line. Sit back and wait for the disasters. [1 copy available]
$ 7.75 + $ 3.09 media shipping

THE SHADOW CATCHER: A Novel
by Marianne Wiggins. B&W era photos throughout. Condition: NEW 2008 Simon & Schuster Trade Paperback, second printing. Very light edge wear. Content: Wiggins takes a magnificently Sebald-like approach to fictionalizing the life of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952)—along with that of a woman named "Marianne Wiggins." The book opens as Wiggins presents her newly completed Curtis novel to a Hollywood agent. Curtis photographed American Indians in the early 20th century, and Marianne attacks the common image of Curtis as a swashbuckler who risked his life to photograph his favorite subjects. Even as she shows that Curtis staged the shots, and was an absentee husband and father at best, the agent is enthralled. Marianne, ambivalent, arrives home to a phone call that her father is in a Las Vegas hospital—the father who has been dead for 30 years. From that quick setup, the novel moves seamlessly back and forth between Marianne's painstaking research into Curtis's life and the journey she undertakes seeking closure with her father's past. Photographs taken by Curtis and from the Wiggins's family album, which she approaches from multiple angles, give the story several layers of immediacy. Curtis emerges as a fascinating, complex figure, one who inhabited any number of American contradictions. Suffused with Marianne's crackling social commentary and deceptively breezy self-discovery, Wiggins's eighth novel is a heartfelt tour de force. [1 copy available]
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SIN KILLER: A Novel [The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1]
by Larry McMurtry. Wrap-around cover art in the style of Bodner or Catlin. Condition: NEW 2002 Simon & Schuster hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), first printing. Content: This is a wildly entertaining ride through the untamed Great Plains. The first installment of a proposed tetralogy, The Berrybender Narratives, Sin Killer follows the adventures of the Berrybenders, a large, noble English family traveling the Missouri River in 1832. This deeply self-absorbed and spoiled family leaves England for the unknown of the American West, based solely on a "whim" and Lord Berrybender's desire to "shoot different animals from those he shot at home." The novel joins the family as they make their way toward Yellowstone aboard a luxury steamer, accompanied by a motley assemblage of servants, guides, and natives. Along the way, this "floating Europe" and its bickering, stubborn passengers encounter constant adversity, including warring natives, hellacious weather, accidental deaths, and kidnappings. [1 copy available]
$ 4.79 + $ 3.19 media shipping

SNOW MOUNTAIN PASSAGE: A novel of the Donner Party
by James D. Houston. Condition: NEW 2002 Harvest Trade Paperback, first printing. Very clean & tight. B&W maps. Content: Brilliantly imagined and grippingly told, "Snow Mountain Passage" is a novel of the Donner party as seen through the eyes of one of the group's leaders and the imagined "trail notes" of his daughter. [1 copy available]
$ 5.75 + $ 2.89 media shipping

SOUTHWESTERN HOMELANDS (Signed copy)
by William Kittredge. Condition: NEW 2002 National Geographic hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket). First Edition, signed by author. Content: For part of each of the last 20 years, Kittredge has ventured to the storied desert landscape around Arizona and immersed himself in the region’s wide-ranging wonders and idiosyncrasies. He brings all this experience to bear as he takes us on a rewarding tour of the territory that runs from Santa Fe to Yuma, and from the Grand Canyon on south through Phoenix and Tucson to Nogales. It is a region where urban sprawl abuts desert expanse, where Native American pueblos compete for space with agribusiness cotton plantations, and where semi-defunct mining towns slowly give way to new-age hippie gardening and crafts enclaves. As part-time resident and full-time observer, Kittredge acquaints us with one of the country’s most vital and perpetually evolving regions. Populated with die-hard desert rats on the banks of the Colorado, theoretical physicists in Albuquerque, Hopi mothers and their daughters, and renegade punk-rock kids sleeping in the streets, this book is as much about the legacies of a territory’s colorful past as it is about the alternately exciting and daunting complexities of its immediate future. Inspires deep longing for those of us in diaspora from New Mexico/Colorado. [1 copy available]
$ 18.49 + media shipping

TALL IN THE SADDLE: Great Lines from Classic Westerns
by Peggy Thompson & Saeko Usukawa. 70+ color and B&W movie stills illustrate.. Condition: NEW 1997 Chronicle Books odd-shaped (0.5 x 8.0 x 8.8, 118 pages) softcover, first edition, first printing. Content: Tall In The Saddle salutes that best-loved of American film genres, the Western. Over 350 great lines culled from nearly 150 classic movies capture the spirit of the West in all its grit and glory. Dramatic stills of memorable moments, vintage advertisements, and flamboyant posters accompany these words to live by. Great book for Western film history buffs. [1 copy available]
6.55 + $ 3.19 media shipping

TRUE GRIT
by Charles Portis. B&W movie stills inside front & back covers. Condition: Very good 1969 Signet Paperback, 4th printing (movie edition). Spine crease & small edgewear, interior clean & tight with small scrape inside cover. Content: A great story of a young woman in the Old West - but then everyone knows this story, so I won't bore you with a description. [2 copies available]
$ 7.89 + $ 2.89 media shipping

WOVEN ON THE WIND:
Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West (Uncorrected Proof)
edited by Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, & Nancy Curtis. Cover photo by Barbara Van Cleve. Condition: NEW 2001 Houghton Mifflin Uncorrected Proof in Trade Paperback form. May contain material that did not make it to publication. Content: This anthology of more than 150 contemporary women writers from the West is a sequel to Leaning into the Wind . Through poetry, memoir, and essay, it examines the friendships of women leading secluded rural lives and how their bonds were formed over picking chokecherries, mending fences, or sipping coffee in the back of a pickup at sunset. Images of the West, the high plains, desert winds, and sagebrush are abundant, lending a romantic air to the uncomplicated prose. By focusing on the associations among women living in the remote West, the editors shed light on the complexity of relationships. Themes of isolation, intimacy, and independence weave through the pieces, unifying the collection as a whole. Regardless of demographics, the message is universal: relationships are necessary for survival. Though this collection leans toward the sentimental, it is eminently readable, having the appeal of being written by everyday women. There is nothing lofty about this book. On the contrary, it's proudly down to earth. [1 copy available]
$ 6.50 + $ 3.19 media shipping.