Marshall Sprague — A Gallery of Dudes, signed first edition (1967)

What this book is

Marshall Sprague was the longtime Western-affairs writer for The New York Times from his base in Colorado Springs, and one of the principal narrative historians of the late-19th and early-20th-century American West. A Gallery of Dudes is his cultural history of the Eastern visitors who came to the West — the European nobility, the millionaires from New York and Boston, the writers and journalists, the railroad guests — who collectively created the dude-ranch economy and a particular set of expectations about what the West was supposed to be. The book is now widely cited in cultural-history scholarship on Western tourism and the construction of regional identity.

This copy is the 1967 Little, Brown hardcover, with the original cream-and-orange dust jacket intact. The copyright page is explicit: it carries the words FIRST EDITION on a separate line, with copyright dates 1966 and 1967, the Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-21991, and a "Published simultaneously in Canada by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited" notice that confirms a true first.

Why this copy matters

It's signed by the author and inscribed by his daughter to him. Both signatures are on the half-title page.

The combination is unusual and meaningful. Sammie Lee Sprague was the author's daughter; she gave him a copy of his own book the Christmas after publication, and he signed it as the author below her dedication. Books inscribed by an author to a family member are a specific category of provenance — collectors and special-collections librarians treat them differently from author-to-fan inscriptions, and they tend to surface when family estates are settled decades later.

The donated copy also includes a laid-in newspaper clipping referencing "Daughter of Gen. P[atton] Dies in [London]" — the kind of ephemera that gets tucked into a personal-library copy and stays there. Whether it's connected to the inscription or simply a placekeeper from a later reader is a question for whoever inherits the next-home decision.

Multi-part bibliographic record

Three photographs document the points that matter for verification.

How it came in

This copy arrived in May 2026 through a recent NMLP donation. The book was in clean condition; the dust jacket survived; the laid-in newspaper clipping was still in place. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy.

Where it's going

A signed first edition with family inscription routes to an appropriate next-home: a Western-history collector, a Sprague scholar, or a Little, Brown first-edition collector specializing in postwar Americana. I'll list it through proper channels with the full bibliographic record (the three photos here become the listing's primary evidence).