Ranch A-C Front.Qxd

Ranch A-C Front.Qxd

Catalogue Ten –Part Four THE RANCHING CATALOGUE VOLUME ONE A-C Dorothy Sloan – Rare Books ◆ , Dorothy Sloan-Rare Books, Inc. Box ,Austin, Texas - Phone: () - Fax: () - Email: [email protected] www.sloanrarebooks.com All items are guaranteed to be in the described condition, authentic, and of clear title, and may be returned within two weeks for any reason. Purchases are shipped at customer’s expense. New customers are asked to provide payment with order, or to supply appropriate references. Institutions may receive deferred billing upon request. Residents of Texas will be charged .% state sales tax. Texas dealers must have a tax certificate on file. Catalogue edited by Dorothy Sloan and Jasmine Star Catalogue preparation assisted by Manola de la Madrid (of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage), Peter L. Oliver, Anthony V. Sloan, Jason Star, Skye Thomsen & many others Typesetting by Jasmine & Jason Star Offset lithography by David Holman at Wind River Press. Letterpress cover and book design by Bradley Hutchinson at Digital Letterpress Photography by Eric Beggs, with the assistance of Anthony V. Sloan INTRODUCTION R C evolved as a result of our firm accepting on consignment TDudley R. Dobie’s massive library on Texas and the West. In truth, it was the two lovely edi- tions of Mary Austin Holley’s wonderful and guides to Texas that initially caused an acquisitive gleam to sparkle in my eyes. However, the first logical question was:“What in the world will we ever do with the other , books?” Confronted with a veritable avalanche of books, we decided to organize the material into subject catalogues that had the potential to enhance the understanding and bibliography of Texana and Western Americana. We began this process with our publication of the first catalogue of the Dudley R. Dobie, Sr. series, devoted entirely to the life and work of his cousin, J. Frank Dobie. Over , individual items were offered in our Catalogue Ten (Part ), the J. Frank Dobie Catalogue. Our next catalogue in this series was for an auction of select rarities from Dudley R. Dobie’s library. The third catalogue in the series was our Catalogue Ten (Part ), documenting the life and work of master printer Carl Hertzog of El Paso (over , entries). Serendipity reigned, and we were asked to handle Carl Hertzog’s own library, which was included in, and greatly enhanced, the Dudley R. Dobie Hertzog catalogue. The present catalogue is the fourth in the Dudley R. Dobie series, and it is devoted entirely to the subject of ranching. This is but the first installment (letters A-C) of the four parts of the Ranching Catalogue. After the four parts of this Ranching Catalogue, the other catalogues to be published in the Dudley R. Dobie series will be Texas County and Local History; the Big Bend; and a quite extensive auction of general Texana and Western Americana. At the moment when we were on the verge of publishing the first part of the Dudley R. Dobie Ranching Catalogue, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles approached our firm about handling their duplicates from the collection of Fred A. Rosenstock, the well-known Colorado bookman. Several years ago, the Autry Museum astutely purchased the fabulous Rosenstock Collection as the foundation of their important Research Center library. After sev- eral years spent selecting all of the books and other materials appropriate to the Autry Museum’s institutional scope, the Museum was left with a huge number of Western Americana duplicates, rivaling in number those of the Dudley R. Dobie Library. Fred Rosenstock and Dudley R. Dobie were both avid bookmen and respectable bibliomaniacs whose passion led them to accrue vast numbers of books. With the library of Dudley R. Dobie, Sr., I already had more books than I ever imagined would pass through my hands in my professional life. Thus, I felt some trepidation about taking on yet another huge consignment of books from the Autry Museum. But all caution and prudence were thrown to the four winds in the blink of an eye when I visited the Autry Museum to view their Rosenstock duplicates. Never had I seen such enticing “leftovers” as those that remained after the Research Center staff had made their selections of material to retain for their library. Among the very first books spied on the shelf was a very fine copy of the first printing of E. C. (“Teddy Blue”) Abbott’s We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher edited by Helena Huntington Smith and illustrated by Ross Santee (appropriately, Item in the present catalogue). Not only was the Rosenstock duplicate of Abbott’s book in wonderful condition, it also had the elusive dust jacket! That was one of the books that Dudley R. Dobie did not have in a first edition in his col- lection. That was it—one of those fateful moments when the door opens wide and one falls through. Never mind practicality. Never mind that each day has only twenty-four hours. Never mind the questionable bottom line. It suddenly seemed not only proper and desirable, but absolutely necessary, that I boldly assume responsibility for not only the Dudley R. Dobie Library, but the Autry-Rosenstock duplicates as well. As I worked my way through a swift inspection of the huge gathering of Autry-Rosenstock du- plicates, I became more and more excited in realizing how perfectly the Dobie and Rosenstock Sloan Rare Books ranching books complemented one another. Dobie’s collection emphasized Texas and the South- west, with interesting inroads into Mexico and Argentina. Rosenstock’s collection, while rich in Texas material, had great strengths in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Between the two collections, the range of variants, editions, and unique association copies was marvelous. Here was a unique opportunity not only to catalogue and sell good, solid books, but to do something significant with them that would honor both Dobie and Rosenstock. I must admit that deciding how to organize the sale of these tens of thousands of books was a dilemma for us, since we are much more accustomed and inclined to deal with the few, select rar- ities, such as rare cartography, high spots of Western Americana and Texas, or the Zamorano Eighty collection of the most important books on California. Seeing the large number of mint copies of the worthy Arthur H. Clark publications, our first step was to create a bulletin of those wonderful titles as a way of gingerly dipping our toes into a vast river of Western Americana in which we feared we might drown. Next, we conducted a careful roundup of the Rosenstock duplicates that related to ranching. This meant reviewing tens of thousands of books and pulling titles found in Ramon Adams’ bibliography, The Rampaging Herd: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Men and Events in the Cattle Industry (Item herein). Since Adams’ bibliography was published in ,we encountered many ranching books published after Adams’ book was completed; of course, we added those books. In reviewing every single Rosenstock duplicate, we also discovered many books that were not in Herd, but which had good ranching content, or in some way illuminated the wide horizon or the nooks and crannies of the cattle country. We felt that such books offer important insights and present an opportunity for libraries and collectors with ranching collections to expand their existing holdings in a meaningful way with Western Americana titles of tangential interest. When we went back to the ever-patient and understanding Dobie family and explained what we wished to do with respect to the Dobie Ranching Catalogue, Marcelle Dobie Smith, Dudley R. Dobie, Jr., and Jim Dobie graciously agreed to allow us take temporary leave from their consign- ment to work with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles. In November of we conducted an auction at the Autry Museum of the non-ranching Rosenstock duplicates—over , individual items relating to American and Western history. The Autry staff, including Manola de la Madrid, Jeanette Hoskinson, Sharon Johnson (rest in peace), Kevin Mulroy, and many other hardy souls at the Museum kindly assisted us in this unusually large undertaking. Next we brought the Rosenstock duplicates of ranching titles from Los Angeles to Austin, where we had constructed a special climate-controlled library with compact shelving to properly and securely house the Rosenstock and Dobie ranching books. The fortuitous commingling of these ranching books, along with other consignments from generous, interested parties, is the cat- alogue you now hold in your hands (or view over the Internet); three additional parts to this Ranching Catalogue will be published over the next year and a half. Perhaps we are not the most fit to loose this motley herd on the bibliophilic world. We find par- ticular delight in the arcane corners of the cattle country, such as photographs of herding turkeys in Texas, a little gem of an essay on horse slobber, and epic gaucho poetry. Other tales that piqued our interest involved the heartbreak of a tough cowboy reduced to licking horse sweat from his saddle after the chuck wagon’s salt was lost on a rough trail drive; the daring introduction of the “divided skirt” for women riding astride in Ouray County, Colorado; Philip St. George Cooke’s account of “The Battle of the Bulls” during the - Mormon Battalion march across the jor- nada de muerte from New Mexico to California; a masked ball in wild and woolly Deadwood at which one lady wore a dress emblazoned with all the regional cattle brands; Captain Jack Craw- ford’s hilarious account of “Broncho vs.

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