Mark Winter — The Master Weavers, signed

What this book is

The Toadlena and Two Grey Hills weaving region is a band of land on the eastern slope of the Chuska Mountains in the Navajo Nation, just over the New Mexico line in McKinley County. Since the late 19th century it has produced what many specialists consider the most technically refined Navajo weaving tradition: tightly woven natural-color rugs in geometric patterns, the wool spun and the dyes prepared on site, the weavings traced through specific named master weavers across generations.

Mark Winter is the longtime owner of the Historic Toadlena Trading Post in Newcomb, NM, the principal authentication center for this regional tradition. The Master Weavers is his comprehensive documentation of the region's hundred-year history — biographies of master weavers, hundreds of color plates of rugs with full provenance, technical notes on weaving structures, and the social and economic context that produced this tradition. It is a doorstop — nearly 600 pages, large format, dense with photographs of named rugs.

The book is a working reference for serious Navajo-textile collectors, gallery owners, museum curators, and the descendants of the master weavers documented in it. It is the book that gets pulled off the shelf in a Santa Fe gallery to confirm whether a particular rug came from the region. Its print run was small relative to demand, and good-condition copies have not stayed on the open market for very long since publication.

Why this copy matters

It's signed by Mark Winter at the Toadlena Trading Post itself.

The Toadlena notation is meaningful. Books signed at a specific place and date trace back to specific events — in this case, almost certainly a visit to the trading post in June 2016, where a buyer or collector would have purchased the book directly and asked Winter to sign it on the spot. That single signature converts the book from a reference work into a small piece of trading-post history. Toadlena Trading Post visitors have included serious Navajo-textile collectors for decades; signed copies tend to come from that audience.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized. Book in collector-grade condition with dust jacket intact.

Where it's going

Signed copies of The Master Weavers route to serious Navajo-textile collectors or to gallery and museum reference shelves. I’ll list it through proper channels with the full bibliographic record (photos here become listing evidence). Ideal next-home is a Navajo-textile gallery or a private collector who builds a working reference library on the topic.