Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred
The Exurban Library: Why These Communities Are Different
I've bought books from nearly every community in central New Mexico at this point, and I can tell you without hesitation that the collections I find in Santa Fe County's smaller communities are consistently among the most valuable I encounter. Not just large — deliberately built. These are libraries assembled by people who chose every book on their shelves with intention and care.
The reason is straightforward. The communities surrounding Santa Fe — Eldorado, Tesuque, Cerrillos, La Cienega, Galisteo, and others — attracted a very specific kind of resident over the past forty years. Wealthy retirees from both coasts who brought their professional libraries with them. Artists who built studio compounds and accumulated decades of exhibition catalogs and reference materials. Writers who chose rural retreats and surrounded themselves with the books that shaped their craft. Second-home owners from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago who stocked their Santa Fe houses with the books they actually wanted to read, free from the clutter of their primary residences.
The result is a concentration of curated, high-quality private libraries that you don't find in more typical suburban communities. A bookshelf in Eldorado is more likely to hold signed first editions, art monographs from major museum exhibitions, and scholarly works on Southwest history than a bookshelf in most other New Mexico neighborhoods. That's not snobbery — it's simply what happens when a community attracts readers and collectors with the means and inclination to build serious personal libraries.
Take Eldorado as an example. It's a planned community of roughly six thousand people south of Santa Fe, and the demographics skew heavily toward retirees. Many of these residents had careers in law, medicine, academia, government, or technology before moving to New Mexico. They brought their professional libraries, their personal collections, and often their parents' collections too. A single Eldorado household might contain three or four thousand books spanning fifty years of reading — and because the owners were deliberate collectors, the condition tends to be excellent.
Tesuque is a different story but the same principle. It's a tiny village north of Santa Fe with an extremely wealthy, artistically oriented population. Galleries, private collections, studio compounds with libraries that reflect decades of creative practice. The art book collections that come out of Tesuque are among the most valuable in the state, and I've handled enough of them to know exactly what to look for.
Then you have the Turquoise Trail communities — Cerrillos, Madrid, and the settlements between them. These former mining towns have reinvented themselves as artist colonies, and the residents who've settled here tend to be deeply interested in the region's history. The Cerrillos Hills contain the oldest turquoise mines in North America, and that mining history has generated a body of scholarly and popular literature that collectors actively seek. Add the Route 66 connection, the mining-town heritage, and the creative community, and you get household libraries with surprising depth in local history, geology, gemology, and Southwestern arts.
La Cienega and Galisteo round out the picture. La Cienega is a small community with ranches and artist compounds tucked into the river valley southwest of Santa Fe. Galisteo is tiny, remote, and exclusive — a handful of writers and artists living in an ancient landscape where the light and silence attract people who take their reading seriously. The libraries in these communities tend to be deeply personal, carefully maintained, and often contain items the owners don't realize have significant market value.
That's why I make the drive. These aren't bulk pickups from houses full of random paperbacks. These are curated collections with real depth, and they deserve someone who knows how to evaluate them properly.