Sell or Donate Your Books in Taos

Last verified July 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

Why Taos Book Collections Are Extraordinary

Taos has been producing remarkable private libraries since the 1920s, when Mabel Dodge Luhan began inviting writers and artists to her estate on the edge of Taos Pueblo. She brought D.H. Lawrence from Europe. She drew Witter Bynner up from Santa Fe. She attracted painters, intellectuals, and cultural figures from New York and beyond. What she started wasn't just a house party — it was a literary colony that's been running, in various forms, for over a hundred years.

That colony has produced layers of literary history. D.H. Lawrence wrote some of his most important later works at Kiowa Ranch, north of Taos. His first editions from that period — St. Mawr, The Plumed Serpent, Mornings in Mexico — circulate in Taos households more than anywhere else in the American Southwest. Frieda Lawrence stayed in Taos after his death, and items connected to her, to the ranch, and to the Lawrence circle turn up in estates with surprising regularity. I've handled Lawrence-connected material from Taos homes that auction houses would have been glad to catalog.

After Lawrence came Frank Waters, who lived in Taos for decades and wrote The Man Who Killed the Deer and Book of the Hopi — both still in print, both with active collector bases. Spud Johnson ran the Laughing Horse Press and published a legendary literary magazine from Taos. John Nichols arrived in the 1960s and wrote The Milagro Beanfield War, which became both a beloved novel and a Robert Redford film. Richard Bradford wrote Red Sky at Morning while living here. Natalie Goldberg turned Taos into the backdrop for Writing Down the Bones, one of the best-selling books on the craft of writing ever published. Each of these writers attracted readers, students, and fellow writers — all of whom built their own libraries.

Then there's the visual arts. The Taos Society of Artists — Blumenschein, Phillips, Couse, Sharp, Berninghaus, Dunton — put Taos on the American art map in the early twentieth century. The catalogs, exhibition records, and art books generated by that movement and its successors have been accumulating in Taos households for a century. When a longtime Taos art collector or gallery owner passes away, their library often contains material that simply doesn't exist anywhere else: limited-run catalogs, signed artist monographs, gallery ephemera from shows that were never digitized.

And then came the counterculture. The late 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of communes to the Taos area — New Buffalo, the Lama Foundation, the Hog Farm, and dozens of smaller experiments in communal living. The Lama Foundation published Ram Dass's Be Here Now, one of the defining texts of that era. The commune movement generated its own literary ecosystem: underground newspapers, hand-printed books, spiritual texts, and self-published accounts that are now actively collected. Many of these items survived in Taos homes long after the communes themselves dissolved.

That's why a Taos collection deserves a careful eye before anything leaves the house. A single Taos bookshelf can hold material spanning the entire twentieth century — from Mabel Dodge Luhan's era through the counterculture through contemporary Southwest literature. Knowing what's valuable, and where to sell it, is the difference between a windfall and a giveaway.

The Literary Colony Legacy: What Makes Taos Estates Different

When a longtime Taos resident passes away — particularly someone who's been part of the artistic or literary community — their library often tells a story that goes beyond the books themselves. I've learned to look not just at the titles on the shelves but at what's inside the covers: inscriptions, dedications, letters tucked between pages, gallery invitations used as bookmarks, marginalia from decades of engaged reading.

Association copies are the crown jewels of the Taos literary colony. An association copy is a book that was given from one notable person to another — inscribed, signed, sometimes with a personal message. In Taos, the colony was small enough and interconnected enough that these copies passed between writers, artists, and cultural figures with surprising frequency. A copy of The Man Who Killed the Deer inscribed from Frank Waters to Mabel Dodge Luhan isn't just a book — it's a primary historical document. A copy of The Milagro Beanfield War inscribed from John Nichols to another Taos literary figure carries both collector value and historical significance.

I've encountered this material in Taos more than anywhere else in New Mexico. The colony was concentrated in a small geographic area, and the social connections between members were dense. When one colony member died, their books sometimes passed to friends and neighbors rather than family. Over the decades, this created a network of interlocking private libraries where materials from multiple colony figures ended up in the same household. A single Taos estate can contain inscribed copies from three or four different colony-era writers, each one individually valuable and collectively irreplaceable as a set.

The same principle applies to the visual arts community. When a Taos gallery owner or art collector dies, their library often includes catalogs that were never widely distributed — exhibition materials from small Taos galleries, artist proof catalogs, gallery price lists that double as reference materials, and correspondence from artists tucked into the pages of their monographs. This kind of ephemera may look like clutter to someone clearing a house, but it's exactly the material that collectors and institutions seek out. I know what to look for, and I make sure it's handled with the care it deserves.

The counterculture era adds yet another layer. When members of the commune generation pass away — and many are now in their seventies and eighties — their libraries often contain a mix of published works and ephemeral materials from the commune period. Underground newspapers, mimeographed pamphlets, hand-printed Lama Foundation publications, and self-published accounts of commune life are all present in these collections. Some of this material exists in only a handful of copies worldwide. Institutions like the New Mexico History Museum and university special collections actively acquire it, and private collectors compete for the best items.

This is why I encourage Taos families not to rush the process of clearing a library. Call me before you start filling boxes for the thrift store. What looks like a shelf of old books might contain material with genuine historical and monetary value. I can't drive to Taos, but I'll walk through the collection with you by photo and phone, help you identify what's worth selling and where, and make sure nothing valuable slips through the cracks.