Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
Arizona and the Southwest at the University of Arizona Library Special Collections
Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610. Courtesy of the University of Arizona Library Special Collections.
SS: My impression is that the library was collecting Arizona materials from a much earlier time, but they were never formerly put in their own unit within the library until the 1950s. Especially in the book area, some of the materials that were in Special Collections were collected at an earlier time, before the establishment of Special Collections. The manuscript aspect of it really did not pick up until the establishment of Special Collections and you can really see that when that some of the earliest manuscripts were acquired, it tends to be the late fifties.
JC: What are the most notable rare and valuable books on Arizona and the Southwest in your collection?
SS: In conjunction with a colleague, I was the major force behind the web site, what is scanned there reflects my opinion. Cabeza de Vaca is obviously huge, Villagra’s, History of New Mexico, and then when you get into the manuscript stuff, I think Kino, Garces, Domingues and Escalante are all huge as far as the documentary history of the Southwest. And then, when you get into the later periods, [Josiah Gregg’s] Commerce of the Prairies, which talks about the Santa Fe trail, and then you talk about Arizona history, a book called Vanished Arizona that seem to be picked as the most realistic portrayal of life in Arizona during that time period. [Martha] Summerhayes is the most prominent of those narratives. Another one that is often referred to as authoritative source is Edward Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest, that’s a real big one. And of course Bancroft’s work on Arizona and New Mexico is classic stuff.
Definitely part of our collecting policy is that we try to acquire first editions. For example, with Abbey, that was a very difficult thing to do because with his early stuff was very difficult to find. For example we have first editions of every Edward Abbey book. Because he is fairly contemporary doesn’t seem like it would be that much of a big deal but some of his early stuff is really hard to find. In fact, his last one, which was Black Sun, we didn’t acquire until the mid nineties.
Then there are more general histories of Arizona, Marshall Trimball’s Arizona, a Cavalcade of History is an often cited work. Actually Lawrence Clark Powell did a history in 1976 which is a nice reader friendly history. As far as more recent stuff, Tom Sheridan’s book Arizona: A History is pretty good as far as giving a broad picture. That’s the thing about Southwest history is there are so many sub-themes and categories because you have general histories, then you have the narratives of people who were there, another one being John Clum.
