Marc Simmons — Ranchers, Ramblers and Renegades (Santa Fe, 1984)

What this book is

Marc Simmons (1937–2023) was the dean of New Mexico popular history. Over a six-decade career he wrote roughly forty books on NM-region history, hosted the long-running "Trail Dust" column in the Santa Fe New Mexican, won multiple Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, and was generally credited as the bridge between scholarly Spanish-colonial and territorial-era NM scholarship and the popular reading audience. He died at his home near Cerrillos, NM, on September 14, 2023; his signature pool is now closed.

Ranchers, Ramblers and Renegades is the second collection in his long-running series of popular-history essay anthologies, drawn from his "Trail Dust" newspaper columns of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The 1984 Ancient City Press first edition collects 56 short essays (each 3–6 pages, Saturday-afternoon length) on the colorful and obscure characters of the New Mexico territorial period (1850–1912). Subjects include the Bonito City murders, the Mayberry mining-camp slaughter, the first NM penitentiary, Apache campaigns, the Lincoln County War, the captured McComas children, the Catholic-Protestant tensions of the 1880s, train robbers, and a small detective novel's worth of mostly forgotten Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and southwestern-NM territorial residents.

Ancient City Press is a small Santa Fe regional press founded by Mary Powell in 1968. It published Simmons's popular-history collections through the 1980s and 1990s and remained an independent NM publisher through the early 2000s before its catalog was acquired by Sunstone Press. The press's design aesthetic — clean serif typography, restrained color palettes, soft cover designs by Powell herself or close-collaborator artists — is recognizable to NM-history collectors and gives Ancient City first editions a distinct visual identity in the secondary market.

Why this copy matters

Marc Simmons signed and published prolifically for forty years. His later mass-trade editions through Ancient City, University of Oklahoma Press, and Sunstone Press are not particularly scarce as a category. What's distinctive about an Ancient City Press first edition from the 1980s is that the print runs were small (a few thousand copies, sized to the regional NM-history market), the books were sold primarily through Santa Fe-area independent bookstores and direct from the press, and Simmons signed copies primarily at Santa Fe and Albuquerque events rather than national signings. Survival rate of clean firsts is therefore lower than for the later wider-distribution titles.

This copy is a clean first edition without an author signature — not a presentation copy, but a clean reading copy with no marginalia or marks. The lack of signature is honest disclosure: Simmons signed many but not all copies, and a clean unsigned first is still a Simmons-collecting datapoint, particularly given the closed pool status that took effect in September 2023.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. Book in clean paperback condition with no marginalia.

Where it's going

Likely route: a Marc Simmons collector building a complete first-editions shelf, a NM-history graduate student, or a Santa Fe-area regional collector. Ancient City Press first editions are the harder-to-source tier of the Simmons bibliography; this is a clean copy in original wrappers.