Phoenix 2017

This book showcases evocative pictures of Southwestern churches taken by Douglas Kent Hall, a well-known documentary photographer. Originally from New York, Hall moved to the small village of Alcalde in northern New Mexico. He spent time travelling throughout the Southwest and along the Mexico-U.S. border in the 1980s gathering material for two photographic books.

In October 1881, Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers had a shoot-out with the Clanton and McLaury brothers on a street in Tombstone, Arizona. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral has become the stuff of legends and the subject of numerous books and movies. This detailed history provides context and information not only about the gunfight itself but also about the booming town of Tombstone and its place in the overall history of the violent Western frontier. It includes photographs of the participants as well as of the site where it took place.

“Writers of mystery stories often have to cast about for the key elements of an intriguing story […] I did not go looking for these critical ingredients of the story of the Tucson Meteorite. They came to me.” states Richard R. Willey in his forward to this short but thorough book. This book explores every aspect of the Meteorites – from their original descent to Earth, their mineral composition, to their use as anvils by American Indians and frontiersmen alike, to their name as a specimen, and the history of how they came to be in the Smithsonian.

There has not been much scholarship published on the history of African Americans in the American West and this may be one of the reasons the average person may have misconceptions about that history. This is why titles such as Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos are such a welcome addition to research collections.

There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research.

Zane Grey, the American author famous for his popular Western adventure novels, published this non-fiction work in 1919. In addition to being a dentist and writer, Grey was an avid fisherman. This title is full of zesty and manly fishing adventures of watching and wrestling with big game fish off the coast of southern California and is tastefully illustrated with photos taken by the author.

Max Ernst was one of the most prolific and original artists of the 20th century. After marrying American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona where they lived until 1953. It was in Sedona that Ernst completed his monumental masterpiece Capricorn. Originally constructed in cement from castings of milk bottles, automobile springs, and other cast offs, the free-standing sculpture was situated opposite the house Ernst built by hand on Brewer Road.

German artist Max Ernst was a pioneer of the Dada and Surrealist movement. After marrying American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona, where they lived until 1953. Initially remote and unpopulated, an artists’ colony soon took root amongst the monumental red rocks.

An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures.

This book tells the story of Frank Luke. Luke was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1897, one of nine children of German-American immigrants. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Aviation Section in 1917 during World War I. He was an agressive pilot who took on the unique challenge of attacking and destroying enemy observation balloons. These balloons were always heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns and enemy aicraft, but 2nd Lt. Luke was adept at the challenge and accounted for 14 enemy balloons destroyed and 4 enemy aircraft shot down.

This 1906 volume features essays written by notable travelers who visited the West, including John Wesley Powell (who was the first director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and whom the Smithsonian's Anthropology Library is named after), artist Thomas Moran, geologist R.D. Salisbury, poet Harriet Monroe, and others. It is illustrated with many black and white photographs, showing the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon.

Beginning in late 1863, author J. Ross Browne accompanied Charles D. Poston on his tour of Arizona as the territory’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs. This book recounts their adventure, presenting a vivid, colorful description of the area and of the terrors which then attended border life in Arizona, where one-twentieth of the population had been swept away by the attacks of the Apaches in three years. Browne's travelogue also contains details on early mining in addition to observations of the lands and people he encountered.

In 1890, Arizona Territory had its own Commissioner of Immigration, John A. Black, who wrote this piece to extol the virtues and resources of the territory.

Nothing says Southwestern style like a great pair of cowboy boots! This book from the Costume collection at the National Museum of American History Library gives information on the “anatomy” of a cowboy boot along with descriptions of the different materials used in their manufacture. The author tells a lively history of the bootmaking industry and features a number of well-known bootmakers. The artful photography of Jim Arndt showcases the wide variety and enduring appeal of American cowboy boots.

“For more than thirty years the author has been gathering information from old timers, Indians, Mexicans, cowboys, sheep-herders, historians, any and everybody who had a story to tell as to the origin and meaning of Arizona names” begins Will Croft Barnes' most well-known work, Arizona Place Names – the product of a lifetime of travel throughout Arizona as a result of his military, political, geographical, and ecological services to the U.S.

“Arizona is a land that is full of history as well as mystery and invites investigation. It has a fascination that every one feels who crosses its boarder. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is both the oldest and newest portion of our country – the oldest in ancient occupation and civilization and the newest in modern progress.” So states Joseph A. Munk in A Romantic Land, the first chapter, or sketch, in this, his first book about Arizona.

“Go to the National Museum in Washington, and I venture the assertion you will find there more objects of universal interest and wonder gained from Arizona, than from any other country you can name.” So states George Wharton James in the forward to Arizona, the Wonderland. James was an enthusiast of the American Southwest who wrote over 40 books about the region, including this tribute to Arizona, an unabashedly enthusiastic travelogue.

Krazy Kat was a well-known American comic strip which ran from 1913 to 1944, written by George Herriman. The premise, a carefree and quirky love triangle of sorts, nearly always put Krazy Kat in the line of fire of Ignatz the mouse, who often found himself at odds with the police dog, Offisa Pupp. The antics in the Krazy Kat comic were always set against a desert landscape, inspired by the vistas at the author's summer house in Arizona. 

Ansel Adams curated a selection of more than 100 images of his photographs of the Southwest, taken between 1928 and 1975. In 1937, Adams wrote to his friend Alfred Stieglitz of his time in the Southwest: "it is all very beautiful and magical here--a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you." In this book, Adams' iconic black and white photographs encompass both expansive, awe-inspiring landscapes and quiet studies of nature and people. 

This colorful catalog for an exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1980 presents photography, painting, and sculpture created by artists who traveled through Arizona and were inspired by the state. The 93 artists included in the exhibition and this catalog span nearly 150 years, and include Helen Frankenthaler, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, and Carleton Watkins. 

This book captures the colorful spirit of the American West in its history and quirks. Included are songs and stories, charts of brands used to mark cattle, and sketches of the boom and bust of the Old West. In one chapter, the author informs us that the Westerner left his names casually and naturally on the land and on each other, without ostentation. This led to names like Jerked Beef Butte or Rattlesnake Basin in Arizona, or nicknames for fellow cowboys like Crooked-Nose Pete and Three-Fingered Smith. 

This 80 paged collector's edition stamp album collector's pays homage to many classic American comics, including but not limited to Dick Tracy, Popeye, Li'l Abner, Flash Gordon, and Krazy Kat.

This work, which includes information about Arizona’s State Amphibian (Hyla eximia, the Arizona treefrog or Mountain treefrog), is part of the important Smithsonian series, Bulletin of the United States National Museum. The Libraries holds a comprehensive collection of Smithsonian publications stretching back to the first publication of the Institution in 1848.