Selling Fray Angélico Chávez Books in Albuquerque

The 1954 Historical Society of New Mexico Origins of New Mexico Families first edition

This is the single most important first edition in the Fray Angélico Chávez bibliography and one of the most important research volumes in New Mexico historical scholarship. It is the archival genealogy of the Spanish colonial period — the Oñate expedition of 1598, the Vargas reconquest of 1692-1693, and the eighteenth-century land-grant families that built colonial New Mexico. Chávez read the Spanish colonial records at the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, the archdiocesan archives in Santa Fe, and the State Records Center, and he traced every Hispano family line he could document. For tens of thousands of Hispano descendants in New Mexico, southern Colorado, West Texas, and Arizona, this book is the reference they consulted to find their great-great-great-great-grandparents on the Vargas roll or the Oñate entrada.

The 1954 Historical Society of New Mexico hardcover first edition is the collectible form. It was reprinted in 1973 by Polyanthos in New Orleans, and then comprehensively revised and reissued in 1992 by Museum of New Mexico Press as Origins of New Mexico Families: A Genealogy of the Spanish Colonial Period, Revised Edition. The 1992 revised edition added material and is the working research tool most genealogists use today — but it is not the 1954 first edition.

Here's the 6-point check I run when a hardcover Origins of New Mexico Families comes across the sort table:

1. Publisher imprint. Historical Society of New Mexico on the title page, Santa Fe. Not Museum of New Mexico Press, not Sunstone Press, not Polyanthos New Orleans. The Historical Society of NM imprint is the 1954 first. Any other publisher on the title page means it's a reprint or the 1992 revised edition.
2. Copyright page. 1954 publication year. No "Revised Edition" language. No "Second Printing" or later-printing notation. The 1954 first should be cleanly 1954 with Historical Society of NM as publisher.
3. No "Revised Edition" statement. The 1992 Museum of NM Press edition explicitly states "Revised Edition" on the title page and the copyright page, and usually on the jacket. If any of those say "Revised Edition," you have the 1992 revision, which is valuable in its own right but is not the 1954 first.
4. Binding and trim. The 1954 first is a substantial hardcover genealogical reference volume — built to sit on a library shelf and get opened hundreds of times. Cloth binding. Full-size trim for a reference book. Compare to the 1992 revised edition, which has its own distinctive Museum of NM Press binding and design.
5. Interior genealogy tables. The 1954 first contains the original research tables. The 1992 revised edition added corrections, additional family lines identified in the intervening decades, and supplementary material. Interior content differences are a secondary identification check — but the imprint on the title page is the first and most reliable signal.
6. Inscribed to a family. Chávez frequently inscribed copies of Origins to specific Hispano families by name. An inscribed 1954 first — "For the [Surname] family, with the Vargas roll lineage on page 279 — Fray Angélico Chávez" — is diagnostically valuable and specific to the family history of the inscribed name. That makes the copy more valuable to a descendant of that named family than to a general collector.

My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico (1974, UNM Press)

Published by University of New Mexico Press in 1974, My Penitente Land is Chávez's most widely-read book-length prose meditation — on Hispano identity, the land, the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the Franciscan missions, and the Penitente Brotherhood tradition (Los Hermanos Penitentes) that has sustained Catholic devotional practice in northern New Mexico villages since the colonial period. It is part memoir, part cultural history, part sacred geography. Outside of Origins, it is the Chávez book most likely to turn up in a reading-identity Hispano household.

First-edition identification is straightforward:

• UNM Press imprint. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1974, on the title page.
• Copyright page. 1974 publication year. First UNM Press edition. No later-printing notation on a first printing.
• Dust jacket. The 1974 UNM Press hardcover first was issued with an original illustrated dust jacket. An intact, unclipped jacket is a condition premium.
• Format. Hardcover, full-size trim, cloth binding. Later paperback editions exist and are reading copies, not firsts.

A Chávez reader who owns My Penitente Land but not Origins is usually a Hispano-culture reader rather than a genealogical researcher. A reader who owns both is a reader who was serious about both the cultural memoir and the archival record. Both are worth careful handling.

The poetry debut — 1939 Writers' Editions Clothed with the Sun and the 1940s verse

Before he was the genealogist and the historian, Chávez was a poet — and the poetry books are the scarcest and most tightly-collected pieces in his bibliography. Clothed with the Sun (1939, Writers' Editions, Santa Fe) is his debut collection, published when he was twenty-nine and only two years ordained. Writers' Editions was a small Santa Fe press active in the 1930s and early 1940s; it is the same circle that published several other Santa Fe modernist poets. Chávez's Writers' Editions debut is a legitimate 1939 Santa Fe small-press publication, which puts it in the same bibliographic category as other Writers' Editions titles from that era.

The principal early poetry and literary volumes:

• Clothed with the Sun (1939) — Writers' Editions, Santa Fe. The debut collection of poems. Santa Fe small-press imprint, limited distribution, scarce on the market. Hardcover with original cloth binding.
• New Mexico Triptych (1940) — St. Anthony Guild Press. Three novelettes of mid-century Hispano-New Mexico village life; an important early-career fiction piece. Franciscan press publication.
• Eleven Lady-Lyrics and Other Poems (1945). A second poetry volume. Scarce.
• The Single Rose / La Única Rosa (1948). A small bilingual poetry volume — Spanish and English. Signature piece for collectors of Chávez's bilingual work.
• Selected Poems, with an Apologia (1969) — Press of the Territorian, Santa Fe. A retrospective selected-poems volume published late in the Franciscan period. Contains Chávez's own apologia for his poetic career.

A Chávez poetry shelf is diagnostic of a different kind of reader than a Chávez genealogy shelf. The poetry books show up in Santa Fe and Taos literary-community estates — households that also have Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Haniel Long, and Peggy Pond Church, the other Santa Fe modernist poets. The genealogy and history books show up in Hispano-heritage family estates. A Chávez collection that spans both — poetry volumes alongside Origins and My Penitente Land — signals a reader who knew all three Chávez voices (the poet, the historian, the cultural memoirist).

The Sunstone Press late career — Jack Rittenhouse's Santa Fe imprint, But Time and Chance, Tres Macho

From the late 1970s onward, Sunstone Press — the Santa Fe independent publisher founded by Jack Rittenhouse — became Chávez's primary late-career publisher. Sunstone published original Chávez works and also reissued several earlier titles, keeping the backlist in print. This is an important identification distinction, because a Sunstone Press Chávez may be either a first edition (of a book Sunstone originally published) or a reissue (of a book Sunstone reprinted).

Sunstone-originated Chávez titles (the Sunstone hardcover is the first edition):

• But Time and Chance: The Story of Padre Martínez of Taos, 1793-1867 (1981) — Sunstone Press. Chávez's scholarly biography of the controversial Taos priest Padre Antonio José Martínez, a pivotal figure in mid-nineteenth-century Hispano-New Mexico history and a long-running subject of historiographical argument. Sunstone hardcover first.
• Tres Macho — He Said: Padre Gallegos of Albuquerque, New Mexico's First Congressman (1985) — Sunstone Press. Biography of Padre José Manuel Gallegos, the Albuquerque priest-politician who became New Mexico's first territorial delegate to Congress in 1853. A late-career Chávez biographical study focused on an Albuquerque subject. Sunstone hardcover first.

Sunstone reissues (the Sunstone edition is not a first edition of these titles — the first is an earlier publisher):

• La Conquistadora — originally 1954 St. Anthony Guild Press. Sunstone reissues are reading copies.
• Various poetry and short-fiction titles — Sunstone kept backlist in print; the original publishers (Writers' Editions, St. Anthony Guild, Press of the Territorian) are the first-edition imprints.

Always check the copyright page on any Sunstone Press Chávez — it will state whether the book is a first Sunstone edition (of an originally-Sunstone title) or a reissue/reprint of an earlier edition. A Sunstone-originated first edition is collectible in its own right; a Sunstone reissue of a 1954 St. Anthony Guild or a 1939 Writers' Editions title is a reading copy.

The Hispano-heritage ABQ and Santa Fe estate shelf pattern

A serious Fray Angélico Chávez shelf in an ABQ or Santa Fe estate almost always signals one of three reader identities: a Hispano family researcher tracing colonial-era ancestry, a Santa Fe Catholic or Franciscan devotional reader, or an academic student of New Mexico history. Often all three overlap in the same library, because the Chávez corpus itself bridges genealogy, devotion, and history.

A Hispano-heritage Chávez shelf typically includes: Origins of New Mexico Families in one or both editions (1954 first or 1992 revised, sometimes both); My Penitente Land in the 1974 UNM Press hardcover; La Conquistadora in the 1954 St. Anthony Guild first or a Sunstone reissue; But Time and Chance and/or Tres Macho in the 1980s Sunstone Press editions; occasional poetry volumes (Clothed with the Sun, The Single Rose, Selected Poems); and sometimes Coronado's Friars or From an Altar Screen on the academic side.

Adjacent on the same shelf — and this is diagnostic — the serious Chávez reader in ABQ or Santa Fe typically also has:

• Paul Horgan — Great River (1954) and Lamy of Santa Fe (1975). Horgan and Chávez both wrote about New Mexico church history; the two shelves overlap almost completely. The Horgan Pulitzer-history volumes and the Chávez archival-genealogy volumes represent two complementary angles on the same subject.
• Harvey Fergusson — Rio Grande, Grant of Kingdom, Wolf Song. The Fergusson Albuquerque-regionalist fiction sits on the same shelf as Chávez's Hispano-history scholarship in any serious ABQ library with deep Hispano roots.
• Erna Fergusson — my Southwest, Dancing Gods, New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples. Hispano-aware regional history of the same period.
• Oliver La Farge — the Santa Fe Anglo-Navajo literary connection.
• Pat Mora — Chicana poetry; contemporary Hispano cultural voice.
• Jimmy Santiago Baca — Chicano/Mestizo poetry; modern descendant of the Chávez voice in a different register.
• Bound runs of New Mexico Historical Review (NMHR) or El Palacio — the academic journals Chávez contributed to most heavily.
• Hispanic Genealogical Research Center of New Mexico (HGRC) publications and Herencia journal issues — the Hispano-genealogy community that treats Origins as foundational.

That is the Hispano-heritage literary-estate fingerprint — Chávez + Horgan + Harvey Fergusson + Erna Fergusson + the Hispano-genealogy-community publications, all together on the shelf. When a shelf like that comes in, I photograph carefully and flag the Chávez inscriptions before I sort anything else.