I have profited from the work of other compilers, but I have not let my choices be determined by theirs. I believe this is the first Southwest bibliography to be limited to a hundred books. It is harder to narrow than to widen the field. To extract the essence is always a laborious process, and in this instance was also a joyous one. If I were to classify the selections my headings would include History and Travel, Biography and Memoirs, Natural History, the Range, Arts and Crafts, Archaeology and Ethnology.
Emphasis is on primary source works rather than on secondary versions.
There is also an understandable lack of popular literature about atomic bomb development in New Mexico. It is noteworthy that although only eighteen women writers are among the hundred, of the five authors who are represented by two works each, four are women. The University of Oklahoma Press with eleven choices leads a total of fifty-one publishers, followed by the University of New Mexico Press with seven. Henry R. Wagner, dead last spring in his ninety-fifth year, was the dean of Southwestern bibliographers, and his The Spanish Southwest and The Plains and the Rockies are cornerstones in the field. A good work on a single subject is Ramon F. Adams' Six Guns and Saddle Leather , a bibliography of bad-man literature.